PLANO, Texas, Dec. 12 /PRNewswire/ -- UGS Corp., a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services, today announced a partnership with Telelogic that has resulted in the PLM industry's first integrated solution for managing the complete lifecycle of the rapidly growing software content built into today's increasingly sophisticated products. This "software lifecycle management" solution -- the result of the integration between Teamcenter(R) software, the world's most widely used PLM portfolio, and Telelogic Rhapsody(R) software -- extends Teamcenter's mechatronic PLM capabilities to include software development. Telelogic enters the UGS Partner Program as a Foundation partner.

The new Teamcenter-Rhapsody solution integrates the Unified Modeling Language(TM) (UML(TM)) with PLM. This brings together requirements and lifecycle management with software systems design and automated code development, thereby extending UGS' industry-leading solution set for managing the complete lifecycle of electro-mechanical software product definitions.

"With the explosive growth of software as a key part of intellectual property in a wide variety of products from automobiles and airplanes to satellites and mobile phones, many of our customers are spending large amounts of time and money developing, testing and tracking these systems to ensure they are synchronized and perform as intended," said Steve Bashada, vice president of Teamcenter Applications for UGS. "Through our ground-breaking partnership, UGS and the Telelogic Systems and Software Modeling Business Unit are providing our customers with the broadest solution that streamlines and automates this process to ensure requirements match performance, software versions correspond to electro-mechanical designs, and significantly less time is required in development and testing."

Expanding customer requirements demand industry-leading solutions

The increasing complexity of products in the automotive, aerospace & defense and high-tech electronics industries has created the need for more sophisticated mechatronic systems (electro-mechanical components controlled by embedded software) to control these products. At the same time, the software content in these systems has been growing rapidly and now represents a valuable piece of a company's intellectual property. To deliver high quality products to market on time that comply with all industry and government regulations, manufacturers need to improve their ability to manage a product's software development process and the embedded software itself, in conjunction with the mechanical and electrical information and processes.

UGS' June announcement of the latest version of Teamcenter included a new capability to treat software as an individual "part" in a product's bill-of- materials (BOM), just as it does with any of the mechanical or electrical parts . This, combined with the new Rhapsody integration with Teamcenter's systems engineering and requirements management capabilities, significantly improves a manufacturer's ability to track each component of a mechatronic system, facilitating product maintenance and regulatory compliance.

Creating customer value and extending software development leadership

Today's announcement extends Teamcenter's systems engineering and data management environment with the tools used to develop the software for these electro-mechanical systems. By integrating Teamcenter with Rhapsody -- the industry's leading Model-Driven Development environment for embedded systems, software and test -- Teamcenter's digital mock-up capabilities are enhanced as a result of adding the software behavior described in Rhapsody to the systems and physical model described in Teamcenter, creating the first ever integrated solution for electro-mechanical products.

UGS is the first PLM provider to address the software development as a core product lifecycle process, as opposed to capturing downstream software data post-development. By offering software lifecycle management, Teamcenter is the only PLM solution on the market today that supports the early development process for software.

"A survey conducted by Aberdeen for its Mechatronics System Design Benchmark Report shows that seven out of ten best in class companies are planning on integrated data management across disciplines," said Chad Jackson, director of Product Innovation and Engineering, AberdeenGroup. "The UGS- Telelogic partnership, together with the link between their Teamcenter and Rhapsody solutions, is an excellent example of the critically important integration that is key to managing design data across engineering disciplines."

Rhapsody is an award-winning, UML and Systems Modeling Language (SysML(TM))-compliant, Model Driven Development environment for software systems design and application development of real-time embedded systems. Rhapsody combines a graphical UML programming paradigm with advanced software systems design and analysis capabilities and seamlessly links with the target implementation language. The Teamcenter-Rhapsody integration results in a complete model-driven development environment, from systems engineering and requirements capture through analysis, design, implementation and test.

"Our partnership with UGS directly addresses the growing challenge of how to effectively develop and manage embedded software applications that are now pervasive in electro-mechanical products," said Gene Robinson, president, Telelogic Systems and Software Modeling Business Unit. "The Rhapsody Model- Driven Development solution automates software development similar to the way MCAD automates mechanical development and EDA automates electrical development. Teamcenter integrates these three disciplines -- mechanical, electrical and software development -- providing for the first time a solution that can manage the whole product definition through the entire product lifecycle."

The first phase of the integrated Teamcenter and Rhapsody solution is available immediately.