PTC India to add 175 SW professionals

BANGALORE: PTC India research and development center in Pune plans to increase its capacity by over 50 percent within the six months. Currently it has 350 professionals employed in the center. "The research and development center is a separate entity and is significantly contributing to the group’s research activities. Recently our Chief Technology officer visited the center and was very impressed with the work done here. He wants to spruce up the work and increase the capacity by over 50 percent within the next six months," PTC India, Managing Director, Kishore Rao.

PTC develops, markets and supports software solutions that help manufacturers win with superior products. Its flagship product, Pro Engineer (ProE) 2001 is soon to have its predecessor called the Wildfire that is to be released globally next year.

"The new version of ProE will fundamentally change the way people look at CAD is all that I can say as a preview of the product. It will be featured with all new technologies, which has been spoken about now in design engineering. It will increase our market share by a huge margin," Rao added. The Pune R&D center has a significant role in building this product.

To make its product more accessible to its customers, PTC India, has appointed Ingram Micro India Ltd., as the second national channel partner; Rolta is the first. "It is our intention that all manufacturing companies -big and small -have access and get support from PTC representatives. It is in that direction that we have tied up with Ingram," remarked Rao.

To emphasize on taking PTC products to its desired customers, Ingram Micro India, COO, NY Prasad, said, "We basically focus on four categories of resellers. One is the general assembler, two is the reseller addressing the corporate and enterprise segment, three is the reseller targeting the SOHO market and four the specific software solutions reseller. For PTC we will be initially focussing on the resellers targeting the corporate and enterprise market and the software solution vendor. This would help them on their reach to the market. For big customers, PTC and Ingram will together work out the go to market strategy."

On the issue of increasing pirated copies ProE doing the rounds in the market, PTC is informed to be aggressively engaged to keep a check on this market, along with Nasscom and the police department. Recently surprise raids in the market by Delhi Police and Nasscom officials enabled them to seize pirated copies of ProE worth Rs 5 crore.