The Cisco Distributed Research and Development (DRD) solution with PTC significantly improves the performance of the Windchill PLM application and Pro/ENGINEER CAD data transfers over a wide area network (WAN). This allows companies deploying these applications to achieve the benefits of centralized application performance, including lower deployment and operational costs, quicker deployment times, and increased flexibility. The solution also optimizes data center resources for centralized Windchill PLM deployments through capabilities such as load balancing and application health monitoring.

The combination of optimized application performance and data transfers across a WAN along with data center infrastructure optimization enables manufacturers to derive significant benefits, including the following:

• Improved productivity and increased data sharing between global teams in various remote locations through accelerated application performance across the WAN
• Increased availability of information and PLM applications through the use of load balancing, failover switching, and other advanced capabilities
• Reduced costs of deployment due to server and data replication avoidance, services offload, virtualized services, and multiple form factors
• Reduced costs, with fewer remote servers and applications, transparent network integration, and reduced maintenance and management costs
• Complete security for mission-critical product development projects by maintaining centralized deployments in highly secure data centers