Last week at its annual user conference, PTC announced that some of its PTC Creo design and analysis applications will be available and supported later this month in a Virtual Desktop environment. Five Creo apps – PTC Creo Parametric (formerly Pro/ENGINEER), PTC Creo Direct (formerly CoCreate), PTC Creo Layout, PTC Creo Options Modeler, and PTC Creo Simulate, have been verified as Citrix Ready and ready for virtualized prime time.
Starting with PTC Creo 2.0 M060, these applications will be supported by PTC when running on virtualized desktops on an IBM server through a Citrix and NVIDIA-powered integration. It will also let users work on a wider variety of operating systems – including mobile – through the Citrix Receiver and NVIDIA GRID vGPU technologies.
PTC’s Virtualized Creo Environment
By supporting virtual desktops, PTC also lets users employ a device of their choice – a device powered by Windows, Mac OS X, or any of the major mobile platforms, such as iOS, Android, and Windows Mobile. This will add an additional element of flexibility and accessibility for PTC users by eliminating the need for every member of an extended development team to have a Windows-based device solely dedicated to design or analysis tasks.
I couldn’t locate any brand new video on the new virtualized Creo apps, but here’s an older one on Creo View Mobile to give an idea of what the new apps might look like.
“Some power users experience network bandwidth limitations when they work with their largest assemblies, simply because they need to move a lot of data from a PTC Windchill server to their local workspace. This inefficiency slows the design process for some of our customers’ most proficient users,” said Mike Campbell, Executive Vice President, CAD Segment, PTC. “But now imagine working on huge assemblies in PTC Creo with little to no network latency impacting your part load times because all of the data is right there – potentially on the same server rack as PTC Windchill – and is therefore almost immediately available. You actually have a better user experience than if you tried loading the data across the network to your local machine.”
In addition to the performance edge, running PTC Creo in a virtualized environment offers customers a level of IP protection that is not available with alternate deployment methods. Company data stays on its servers, allowing customers complete freedom to collaborate with external design partners in real time utilizing the same design data.
The Citrix Ready program helps customers identify third-party solutions that are recommended to enhance virtualization, networking and cloud computing solutions from Citrix. PTC Creo applications completed a verification process to ensure compatibility with Citrix XenDesktop with Citrix HDX 3D Pro and an NVIDIA GRID K2 board with two high performance NVIDIA Kepler GPUs.
PTC says it expects PTC Creo 2.0 M060 will be available in late June (June 21 to be exact). However, the timing of this or any product release, and any features or functionality, are subject to change at PTC’s discretion. Standard PTC floating license pricing applies to the new virtualized Creo apps.
Honestly, based on announcements and conversations a couple of years ago, I never would have imagined that PTC would be this cloud centric at this time and moving forward. As more becomes known, and as they become available, we’ll let you know how the new Creo virtualized apps contrast, compare, and perform with their desktop counterparts.
This announcement could help to finally provide the momentum and customer uptake that PTC has been hoping for until Creo 3.0 is released early next year.
