PTC CEO-Elect Heppelmann Foresees Bullish Growth in Double-Digit for Company

Jim Heppelmann will soon be ordering a new batch of business cards. His current one reads Chief Operating Officer, PTC. Come October, he’ll need one that reads Chief Executive Officer. That’s when he’ll officially succeed the company’s current CEO Dick Harrison, who will become PTC’s executive chairman.

Growing up on his parents’ dairy farm, Heppelmann tinkered with equipment that had a tendency to break down and observed their mechanical lifecycle. Perhaps that was a preview of what he would later do at PTC: develop engineering software and product lifecycle management (PLM) technologies. Just as he prepares to take the helm, latest figures from  industry watcher CIMdata foretells a lackluster period for PLM, a decline of 12% in 2009. (See CIMdata’s press release here.) Nevertheless, Heppelmann is convinced he can shepherd PTC into bullish, double-digit growth.

In 2008, after PTC acquired CoCreate (a direct modeling company), Heppelmann told reporters, “Are we going to merge Pro/E and CoCreate ...? No ... That’s like merging a race car and a SUV. What you end up with is an ugly, slow, funky looking hybrid that doesn’t work well on the road, off the road, and won’t win races.” Yet, the most recent release of PTC’s premiere CAD program Pro/ENGINEER shows push-pull modeling methods commonly associated with direct modelers like CoCreate. So has the time come for Heppelmann to eat his own words and celebrate the birth of hybrid CAD?

In this recorded interview, Heppelmann explains his confidence in PTC’s ability to outperform mainstream PLM market and reflects on flexible modeling (PTC’s approach to inject direct editing functions into Pro/E’s history-based environment).