pure::variants Acquisition Update: Interview with Christoph Braeuchle

After the acquisition of Pure Systems GmbH in October 2023, Christoph Braeuchle, SVP, General Manager of the ALM segment at PTC, and Danilo Beuche, CEO of Pure Systems GmbH talked about the motivation behind the acquisition and the plans to integrate pure::variants with PTC’s Digital Thread solutions. I decided to sit down with him again, to ask how the integration has progressed, and what changes it brought to the ALM segment. 

What organizational changes did the pure-systems acquisition bring? 

Our priority was to ensure continuity in all customer engagements and minimize any distractions that could be caused by the integration process. Since the end of May 2024, Pure-Systems GmbH has been fully merged into PTC, and we are grateful that all employees of Pure Systems GmbH have joined PTC. This is a strong indicator that the entire team believes in the opportunity to make pure::variants a key element in our winning ALM solution. The teams are now fully integrated into our ALM Segment organization and the good collaboration on all levels shows the first positive results. The pure::variants and Codebeamer experts are now working towards a more holistic offering in variant management and product line engineering for Codebeamer while ensuring the continuity of our 3rd party connectors.  

What benefits have PTC customers gained as a result of the acquisition? 

We are now starting to better serve our customers with a complete and increasingly integrated offering, from both technical and commercial points of view, so they benefit from working with one organization. Our customers can address their questions and needs around Codebeamer and pure::variants to an integrated team instead of pulling in people from two separate companies. These teams also collaborate internally to address any challenges – whether they are methodical, technical, or process-based – the goal is to produce seamless and well-aligned solutions that enable our customers to increase efficiency, speed and quality in their engineering processes. 

Where do you have to be in your ALM journey to start PLE?

We do have customers who are using PLE based on pure::variants in combination with their legacy tools, such as IBM Doors Classic, and they get a lot of benefits from it. We will continue to support them with pure::variants as a standalone offering. There’s no change to that. 

At the same time, it’s a good point to start product line engineering when customers are modernizing their ALM toolset. This is a great chance to bake in variation points and all connection points for product line engineering functions because not only the tools are being modernized, but also data and content gets migrated, so it is easier to introduce such a new methodology. 

While introducing Application Lifecycle Management or modernizing the ALM environment is a very good starting point, Product Line Engineering can be introduced at any point in time. A typical approach is to start with one product in a kind of pilot-like fashion and build on those results. Internal stakeholders should directly see the immense benefits that come with product line engineering, with faster time to market, significantly reduced costs and effort, and highly increased productivity and efficiency.  

Long story short, there are no restrictions or limitations in your ALM journey to start product line engineering but modernizing or newly introducing an ALM toolchain offers a very good opportunity. 

How has the integration of pure::variants and Codebeamer progressed? Where are we currently?

Since the Codebeamer 2.2 release in June, we now offer the integration as a built-in feature. Customers that have both products installed can just enable this integration and use pure::variants within the Codebeamer UI. Where customers have previously had to call two companies and get issues addressed separately in those products, they can now call one company. Our next release will further improve the scalability and performance of the integrated solution so that variants of very large data sets can be managed quickly and efficiently.  

We have a well-defined and ambitious plan for holistic configuration management that seamlessly embeds product line engineering and variants management capabilities into Codebeamer, connects the same capabilities with Windchill, our PLM solution, and keeps the technology completely open for third-party integrations. This concept will enable our customers to reuse large parts of all engineering assets, including trace information. Not by creating disconnected copies that are very difficult to maintain but by keeping the connection and being able to update or propagate changes. Our goal is to even co-evolution scenarios where innovations in a particular product variant can be propagated back to the mainline and made available to other variants. We see that as a strong differentiator for Codebeamer in combination with pure::variants going forward. 

 

How has the integration of pure::variants and Windchill progressed?

Variant Management and Product Line Engineering has maximum positive impact when it is holistically introduced in the Engineering Digital Thread. Therefore, we consider a direct link between Windchill's platform management capabilities and pure::variants. The combination of Windchill PLM, Codebeamer ALM and pure::variants will become a unique solution that includes PLM assets like Bill of Materials, product structures, and product platform management and combines that with ALM assets like requirements, tests, software releases, and risk analyses PTC can even offer extensions to software configuration management or model-based systems engineering tools through pure::variants connectors and Codebeamer’s integrations.

Are we planning to extend the number of integrations that pure::variants has with other PTC products?

We are working on a connector for PTC Modeler, which is a leading SysML tool, and one of the first tools worldwide to support SysML V2. Modeler’s configuration and variant management capabilities offer the ideal integration point for pure::variants. Stay tuned for a well-integrated solution with pure::variants capabilities in direct combination with PTC Modeler for Model-Based systems engineering as well as Codebeamer and Windchill for holistic product line engineering. 

What about non-PTC products?

Besides our strategic direction to seamlessly embed pure::variants in PTC’s Digital Thread solutions, it will also remain available as a standalone product – including the library of third-party connectors such as CATIA Magic, or Enterprise Architect for model-based systems engineering, source code management tools, MATLAB Simulink, functional safety and so on. We also have no plans to discontinue connectors with competitive ALM products.  

Will we be extending the number of integrations or just maintaining them?

Wherever there's a need to add additional connectors and customers see the benefit of having direct connectors with pure::variants, we can make it a priority to extend the integrations. pure::variants is an offering that will remain open and will continue to be extended in terms of the integration points. 

How does the future road map of ALM and PLE look like PTC?

We will not only strengthen the technical integration, but we will also work on making it easier to deploy both products in one environment. We will also better align services and support so that customers can talk with experts in a very integrated way, get better Technical Support, following our standard service level agreements for tech support. We plan to soon offer 24/5 support with optional weekend support wherever it is needed.  

Cloud or SaaS offering, for product line engineering capabilities in combination with Codebeamer or Windchill, is also on our roadmap. 

I am excited about the ongoing changes and very happy with our progress since the acquisition and I am looking forward to seeing these improvements and technical updates adding value for our customers.