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New England has a well-deserved reputation as a leader in computer-aided design software (CAD) — the applications that help engineers map out the structure of everything from running shoes to wind turbines.
But the region’s dominance in the CAD field, which dates back four decades to the founding of Computervision Inc. and Prime Computer Corp., has over the years waned as firms like California-based Autodesk Inc. and France’s Dassault Systemes SA have taken over market share.
At the same time, a second tier of firms is growing here, feeding off the region’s CAD and enterprise talent, making software that helps engineers and designers who have to bring the products of CAD software into the business realm.
“This area will be very good for innovation and creating new CAD technologies because there’s a very good talent pool here,” said Kodiak Venture Partners managing partner Lou Volpe, who in 2006 invested in the Series A round for SpaceClaim Corp., a Concord-based maker of collaborative CAD software. Companies building CAD software will always need enterprise-minded partners to connect them to the business side of product development, Volpe said.
When a new, federally funded wind turbine testing facility is completed in Charlestown, Waltham-based Vistagy Inc. plans to put its software to use under the facility’s roof — fruits of a partnership with the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said president and CEO Steven Luby. Vistagy’s software is designed to sit on top of CAD systems and interpret industry-specific terms and knowledge.
“The sort of dirty secret in the engineering community is there’s very little structured data,” Luby said.
For example, “chasing screws” is a typical drudgery assignment in which an engineer must literally count screws, and enter the data into an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. By using the vocabulary of the industry, Vistagy’s software is designed to let engineers enter that metadata as they work, enabling automation.
While Vistagy helps design blades that will revolve atop offshore wind turbines, Invention Machine Corp. has executed a turnaround of its own.
In 2002, the company, then nine years old, was on the verge of bankruptcy, having consumed $26 million in venture investment, said chairman, CEO and president Mark Atkins.
The same year, Invention Machine launched its Goldfire software platform, which provides a workbench of engineering methodologies and a semantic search engine that crawls existing patents. The Boston-based company now has 200 employees in six countries, and has been profitable for five years. Successes include an anti-snoring mattress developed using technology borrowed from military sensors and automobile airbags.
New England’s regional talents for CAD and enterprise software are synergistic, said Fielder Hiss, director of project management at Concord-based CAD maker Dassault Systemes Solidworks Corp. Eight years ago, Solidworks expanded with the acquisition of Swedish product data management (PDM) software company GCS Scandiavia. Solidworks has since found plenty of local expertise to develop that offering, Hiss said.
“There’s a strong talent pool for, of course, not only 3-D CAD, but also product data management, because one really creates the larger need for the other,” he said. “The more CAD you create, the more you need systems to manage the information.”
With a decade longer in the business than either Vistagy or Invention Machine, Rhode Island-based Boothroyd Dewhurst Inc. has had steady success with a straightforward business proposition: saving money on product development. The 14-person company, named after its founders, UMass Amherst professors Geoffrey Boothroyd and Peter Dewhurst, provides cost information from the napkin stage to product redesign — saving up to 50 percent on manufacturing costs, said president John Gilligan.
The program works with CAD software which, Gilligan said, is often limited to design concerns. “Almost all the information is typically about the geometry of the part and not how it’s made,” he said. “If you’re choosing a certain shape or a certain finish or a certain size, what you’re choosing there is going to impact the cost.”
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