DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

It’s been a couple of weeks since I got back from Texas and the PLM Connection event held at the beginning of last month - but I’ve got a few thoughts and whatnot to share from the event. This was the first time that the press has been invited to the event and I was curious to find out what it was like, what the feeling was amongst the users in attendance and of course, to catch up with the folks at Siemens.

PLM Connections is organised by the user group committee, many of whom I got to meet on the first day. It’s clear that this is a user focussed event and the attendance and subject discussed reflects that. There’s often a difference between user events organised by the users (or a group of them), such as this and PTC’s PTC/User events and those organised by the software vendor (think SolidWorks World). It’s quite difficult to put a finger on the different between the two, but there’s something. Whatever it is, both types are focussed on three things: Learning, Updating and Networking.

The learning is satisfied by just under 400 technical sessions that reach across the entire Siemens portfolio - while the event began as an NX (or Unigraphics) focussed event, it now brings together those users with those from the Teamcenter, Tecnomatix and Solid Edge communities. What I found interesting, speaking to a number of both the organisational committee and the users in general, is that they’re typically there for an update on several items from that list - predominately NX and Teamcenter, but the others get a good look into the mix.

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