PTC, the US product lifecycle management specialist behind Pro/Engineer, is buying the Mathcad developer, Mathsoft, for $63.25m in cash. The acquisition will expand PTC`s computer-aided design, manufacturing and engineering (CAD/CAM/CAE) products with predictive engineering capabilities that, it says, will help customers to deliver optimised, higher-quality products, more rapidly.

Massachusetts-based Mathsoft, which has annual income of around $20m, already shares more than 900 customers with PTC. It has 130 employees in seven countries, including the UK, Germany and Japan.

Mathcad has more than 250,000 users worldwide who use it to create, automate, document and re-use engineering calculations for product development, and other mathematics-driven processes. It is an industry standard for authoring and documenting engineering calculations in industries such as manufacturing, engineering, and architecture and construction.

"Mathsoft will be an important addition to PTC, as it will expand both our product offering and our addressable market," says PTC president and chief executive, Richard Harrison. "CAE is one of the faster-growing segments of the product lifecycle management market. PTC is staking out a unique position within this market segment by arming engineers with tools used upfront in the engineering process. This approach delivers greater value to customers because it helps optimise the entire engineering process."

Mathsoft`s approach to CAE, which helps to predict engineering parameters before design begins, is said to complement PTC`s existing structural, thermal, fatigue and mechanism analysis tools that are used to validate Pro/Engineer designs.

Once the acquisition is complete, customers will be able to use Mathcad either by itself or as part of PTC`s Product Development System. Calculations made using Mathcad can predict critical parameters that will drive Pro/Engineer designs, while Pro/Engineer parameters can be fed into Mathcad to perform supplementary engineering calculations.