EDS Lays Out PLM Road Map

Almost a year after it announced the acquisitions of Structural Dynamic Resources Corp. and Unigraphic Solutions, Electronic Data Systems Corp. is rolling out its next steps of its product life cycle management solutions.

EDS created its PLM Solutions division in October with the combination of SDRC and UGS. It became the companys fourth line of business, joining A.T. Kearney, Operations Solutions and Solutions Consulting.

Next week EDS will host an event at its Plano, Texas, headquarters to spell out the fate of SDRCs I-deas and Teamcenter lines, as well as UGS Unigraphics, I-man and Solid Edge lines.

The SDRC and UGS modules are divided into two main suites: Unigraphics and Teamcenter. The Unigraphics solution comprises its namesake UGS suite along with SDRCs I-deas digital master modeling software, Imageware surfacing software and Femap computer aided engineering software.

Teamcenter is the umbrella for Teamcenter Enterprise, originally SDRCs Metaphase; Engineering, originally UGS I-man; Integrator, originally SDRCs Accelis; Requirements, originally SDRCs Slate; and Visualization, a UGS tool. A new product, Teamcenter Manufacturing, has been added to the mix.

EDS vision is to have a single product-authoring environment that brings together components from SDRCs I-deas and UGS Unigraphics products into one offering, Unigraphics NX.

Announced in March, NX is EDS next generation mechanical computer aided design [MCAD] software framework. The first version is expected to ship in July. Version two, which will further the integration of I-deas and Unigraphics, will ship in Q2 of 2003.

The plan is that while both SDRC and UGS customers will continue to be supported for about the next two years, following that theyll migrate to the NX platform.

An SDRC customer since 1998, Wayne Biery is anticipating the migration to NX, and is not too concerned about discontinued support of SDRCs products.

"Were looking forward to switching over. The Metaphase is going to go to Teamcenter and thats a natural evolution anyway," said Biery, manager of engineering design and data at Victualic Company of America in Easton, Penn. "The [resulting] CAD will be a hopped-up, super version of CAD—a new CAD on steroids that is interoperable, where it never was before."

EDS is also pushing ahead on the product development front. Third quarter releases for Teamcenter include Enterprise 3.0, Engineering 8.0, Project 3.0, Aerospace & Defense 2.0 and Teamcenter High Tech Solution 2.0. Fourth quarter releases include Teamcenter Enterprise 3.1, Engineering 8.1 and Community 4.2.