Content Management: PTC To acquire Arbortext
Arbortext serves 1,700 customers worldwide in multiple industries, including discrete manufacturing, life sciences, financial services, insurance, publishing and government. With this acquisition, PTC will be uniquely positioned to enable customers to create, manage and dynamically publish critical information concurrently with the development of related products or services, improving time-to-market, quality, cost and customer satisfaction.
The transaction is expected to close by the end of July 2005, subject to customary conditions including regulatory approval.
“For 20 years, PTC has helped more than 35,000 companies develop superior products and improve productivity in product development,” said C. Richard Harrison, president and CEO of PTC. “By bringing our passion for customer success and our technology leadership to the process of dynamic enterprise publishing, we believe we will be able to accelerate our growth. The complementary PTC and Arbortext solutions will enable companies to better capture and deliver critical content that is the basis for a wide variety of upstream and downstream enterprise deliverables.
“This acquisition is a natural extension of PTC’s product development system vision. Together with Arbortext, we will enable discrete manufacturing customers to manage product content and related documentation from concept through retirement,” Harrison continued. “Additionally, this acquisition expands our footprint into new verticals such as pharmaceuticals, financial services, government and traditional publishing by providing these customers with a complete solution for highly personalized product or service offerings.”
Based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Arbortext has 250 employees in offices around the world and generated approximately $40 million of revenue during the past 12 months. Arbortext’s technologically advanced solutions are revolutionizing the way companies deliver critical business information to multiple audiences through its “dynamic enterprise publishing” approach. By creating and utilizing a single source of XML-based reusable content, Arbortext’s solutions enable the automatic delivery of highly configured interactive content that is accurate, relevant, and precisely tailored to the needs of multiple audiences in a variety of formats. International market research firm IDC ranks Arbortext as a leader in the emerging Dynamic Enterprise Publishing software market, and predicts this market will grow more than 25% annually to over $1 billion in 2009.
Companies of all sizes in all industries create products and services that require vast quantities of documentation such as engineering specifications, user manuals, training materials, promotional materials, product labels, policies and procedures, contracts, service manuals, product catalogs and regulatory submissions. These documents must also meet the specific requirements of multiple audiences, such as customers, employees, partners, investors and regulators. Publishing critical product and service information through an ever-increasing array of media (electronic, print and Web) is one of the most challenging processes companies have yet to optimize.
“Documentation is based on content that evolves constantly, and as such, the process of publishing has traditionally taken place only after products or services are well defined,” said Ray Schiavone, president and CEO of Arbortext. “This has resulted in a manual hand-off of information between various departments where each must laboriously reshape the information to suit their own needs. In addition, the tools traditionally used by companies to publish documents are not flexible or powerful enough to solve the complexity of this process. They require a substantial manual effort, and produce generic information that attempts to meet the needs of all audiences while satisfying none. Arbortext’s technology approach is completely different from that of traditional tools, and significantly reduces waste and duplication inherent in the publishing process today.”
“The powerful combination of PTC and Arbortext will enable the delivery of the industry’s first turnkey solution for creating and managing a single source of product and service information, and then configuring and publishing that information dynamically for a variety of downstream uses,” said Jim Heppelmann, executive vice president and chief product officer of PTC. “Arbortext’s technology fits well with PTC’s product development system, enabling full information associativity throughout the product lifecycle. This will allow product changes to be automatically updated in all formats, ensuring that all enterprise users, suppliers and customers use the most accurate and up-to-date information. The combined solutions will provide customers with a new breed of innovative information delivery vehicles that create highly dynamic and personalized user experiences. At the same time, PTC will leverage the openness and flexibility inherent in our solutions to work with a variety of information sources, content management solutions and other enterprise applications.”
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