Yes, it is ironic. For the first 20 years or so of my tenure with the software, first as a user and later as an employee of the company, we were always struggling to get the industry to recognize us as a major player in the CAD/CAE/CAM world. During that time we were always buried down inside some large organization which in turn was part an an even larger corporation, first as part of McDonnell Douglas and then EDS.
In 1998 we finally started to do business under the name 'Unigraphics Solutions' and when EDS took us public our stock symbol on the NYSE was 'UGS' and while many of us felt a certain amount of pride to think that our flagship product was finally getting the public recognition that it deserved, in retrospect, it was probably a short-sighted mistake naming the company after our primary product. I say this because years later, after we had acquired/merged with SDRC and the decision was made to combine Unigraphics and Ideas together into a new software offering that represented the best of both products, we were suddenly confronted with the reality that we had lost sight of exactly what the name Unigraphics represented, even to the extent that the public use of terms like 'UG' was confusing. And to add to this was the prospect that we, as an organization, having grown as the result of acquisitions and mergers, to the extent that continuing to use the name of the company as the name of but one of our products, albeit the largest in terms of revenue and impact on our overall business, was no longer practical or even appropriate (by then the DNA of several historically competitive products was finding it's way into what we were still calling Unigraphics).
So in 2001 we decided to make a clean break of it, renaming the organization 'PLM Solutions', reflecting the idea that there was much more to what it was that we were offering our customers than just a few CAX products but rather a full 'lifecycle' of technology, and then in 2002, to promote that idea that our efforts to combine the best of several different products was going to result in something that was greater than any of the older legacy names, we decided to relabel our flagship CAD/CAE/CAM system and so 'NX' was born, alluding to it being the 'NeXt' generation of technology.
As they say, the rest is history, and while that's true, we are now living with the knowledge that perhaps getting what you wish for is not always a good thing. In this case, our hopes and desire that the name 'Unigraphics' would get the due it deserved and what we wanted to see as MOMENTUM has now become something more akin to INERTIA. Oh well, I guess it could have been worse, we could have people saying: "Unigraphics, never heard of it."
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Digital Factory
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.