This is a scary time for everybody. We at PTC are concerned about you, our customers – both the health of your employees and the health of your business. We are making a number of changes to better serve you during this period of disruption and are committed to work together with you to get through this crisis.
On the people front, PTC has implemented numerous containment measures to protect our employees from acquiring or spreading the COVID-19 virus. Like many other companies, PTC employees are working from home globally, and we have implemented policies that restrict all international travel and all but the most essential domestic travel. We have closed our Corporate Experience Center (CXC) and cancelled all physical events. Our Customer Success, Technical Support, and Cloud Services teams stand ready to remotely assist you at any time, in any region. We believe that with these measures in place, we can continue to effectively serve the needs of your business for as long as necessary until the crisis passes.
Knowing that many of you, our industrial customers, are implementing similar containment measures in your own businesses, and realizing how disruptive these measures can be, we are proactively implementing new policies to help you continue to be productive with our software solutions during this crisis. We are pleased to offer the following:
- To counter disruptions related to office closings, if your employees encounter challenges accessing PTC software, we will be pleased to collaborate with you to diagnose issues, find work-arounds, and even offer temporary, no-cost licensing options to allow you to configure our software differently during the crisis, for example to enable work-from-home usage. Please contact Technical Support.
- We are offering at no additional charge the highest level of “white glove” support to our many medical device and health-tech customers who are on the front lines in the fight against COVID-19. We ask these customers to contact PTC Technical Support to ensure we are aware of how to best support your efforts.
- Given travel restrictions, we know how challenging it can be to provide technical support to your manufacturing and service employees, as well as your customers. To help address the challenge, we are making our Vuforia Chalk augmented reality (AR) remote support and collaboration technology freely available to our customers and partners to use through June. We will consider further extensions should the crisis duration warrant.
- Recognizing that you may not want to send your employees to industry events, we are convening LiveWorx this year as a free one-day virtual event on Tuesday, June 9 (if you’ve already registered for the physical event, we’ll be sending you a full refund). We invite you to join the virtual event from wherever you are to hear the latest about PTC’s products and strategy, including some great examples of how customers are using our technologies in the war against COVID-19.
- Given the turmoil that exists in the education system right now, we are making freely available our Onshape SaaS CAD solution, plus the associated learning resources, to high schools and universities that wish to offer collaborative virtual STEM and 3D CAD classes to students learning at home, on their own devices. Please contact PTC Academic if there is a school you would like us to engage.
- We know that implementation and upgrade project timelines remain important. Where it is not practical to work onsite, we will continue to staff professional services projects at offsite locations whenever possible.
- In cases where work disruption of any form should create downtime for your employees, PTC is making its eLearning suite freely available for the duration of the crisis so that your employees can use this time to upskill their capabilities and return to work with an advanced level of proficiency and capability. Please see PTC University to explore our educational programming.
These changes are intended to help our customers across the PTC ecosystem be as productive as possible throughout this disruptive crisis. This is an unprecedented situation, and it is changing daily, so we will do our best to respond to the changes and update you accordingly. Please be safe, and we’ll continue to look for ways that we can to help you remain productive across your product development, manufacturing, and service operations.