3D CAD NEWS

CADCAMNet has learned that former Mathsoft CEO Chris Randles will be named tomorrow as the new CEO of SpaceClaim. He fills a vacancy left when co-founder and initial CEO Mike Payne was moved to a sole role as chairman of the board of directors.

Randles is currently entrepreneur-in-residence as Borealis Ventures, one of the three venture capital firms backing SpaceClaim. He started with Mathsoft in 2001 as vp of marketing, and later rose to become CEO, the position he held when the company was acquired by PTC in 2006.

CADCAMNet will feature an interview with Randles on Thursday.

Randles was raised in England, but has lived in the US for over 16 years and has dual UK and US citizenship. He holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Oxford and has also completed executive programs at London Business School and Caltech.

Serial CAD entrepreneur Mike Payne may have been asked to vacate the CEO chair at SpaceClaim, (he’s now “just” chairman of the board) but he certainly hasn’t been put in a box. The Boston Globe sought him out to discuss the possible sale of PTC, and he responds with an interesting mini-history of the innovation curve in technology.

Payne’s interviewer is Boston Globe columnist Scott Kirsner, who was less kind to PTC in his written comments than Payne was in the interview.

[Editor's Note: Our usual policy of providing the visuals is being pre-empted so you can obey the headline.]

 

Events of recent weeks have shaken the status quo in the CAD/PLM business. In no particular order:

 

1. Dassault Systemes unveiled “PLM 2.0″ which can be summarized as “visualize whirled parts.”

 

2. Autodesk bought Moldflow, which can be summarized as “visualize plastic parts.”  

 

3. PTC released a new version of CoCreate, which can be summarized as “visualize our hand in your pocket. Please.”

 

4. SpaceClaim is still in business, which can be summarized as “visualize working for a buyout.”  

 

5. Siemens PLM Software “launched” (which in PR language is an intermediary step between “announced” and “shipped”) new versions of NX and Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology. This can be summarized as “visualize us with hot new technology and an 18-month lead on our competitors.”

 

6. Siemens PLM also announced the delivery of Teamcenter licence number 4 million. This can be visualized as a mountain when compared to the total sales of “pure” PLM seats (PDM on steroids) from all competitors combined.

 

 

For the past 36 hours I have been getting emails and phone calls asking if I know about layoffs at SpaceClaim, the venture-funded 3D CAD upstart.  It seems this company is really under the industry microscope — one of the calls was from a well-placed veteran at a SpaceClaim competitor. I’ve made a few phone calls, and can now separate fact from fiction.

SpaceClaim co-founder and CEO Michael Payne confirmed that at the end of 2007 there was some “tweaking” of the employee rolls, but did not want to give a specific number. The layoffs were “not insignificant if you were one of the people” involved, he said, but otherwise characterized the reduction in force as “a minor adjustment” that came after a series of year-end meetings between management and the venture capital companies funding SpaceClaim. Some employees were provided an opportunity to become contractors, a move not uncommon among start-ups.

The one high-profile departure is former chief operating officer Michael McGuinness, hired March 2007. He is no longer listed on the company’s web site with the other executives — as he was the last time the Internet Archives took a peek at the page in May 2007. The last public mention of him seem to be in a company press release dated November 27, 2007. It is not uncommon for executive-level employees to come and go during a company’s early phases, especially one with so much venture capital behind it. McGuiness had been a CEO at two other software companies and did 10 years of hard time at PTC earlier in his career. Maybe the chemistry between McGuinness and Payne wasn’t right.

This news overshadows what SpaceClaim would like us to be talking about today, the release of a new version of the product with a “more targeted” feature set. SpaceClaim LT and SpaceClaim LTX are aimed at the occasional CAD user (likely at smaller companies) who may have both 2D and 3D files to edit. By comparison, SpaceClaim Professional is aimed at those who must edit 3D files from the likes of CATIA, NX, SolidWorks, or Pro/ENGINEER. The main differences between SpaceClaim’s products are import and export capabilities, as well as some options and services that are available with SpaceClaim Professional 2007+. SpaceClaim LT provides import of STEP, IGES, DXF, DWG, BMP, JPG and PNG file formats and export of DXF, DWG, XAML, STL, VRML, BMP, JPG and PNG file formats. SpaceClaim LTX provides these capabilities as well as export of STEP and IGES files for other 3D systems.

These new versions of SpaceClaim could well be the SketchUp on steriods many CAD users in manufacturing and product design have been asking for. We’ll cover these products in more detail next week at CADCAMNet.

3D CAD News learned today that SpaceClaim Corporation has been delisted as an exhibitor at the upcoming Autodesk University 2007, Nov. 27-30 in Las Vegas.

Every year some one or some company gets booted from Autodesk University at the last minute. The line employees — who don’t know one person or company from another — sign up anybody willing to pay the fee. Then eventually, somebody more senior at Autodesk starts going over the list of attendees and exhibitors and sooner or later gets the “oh-oh” feeling. Meetings are called, people yell and wring their hands, and eventually a line employee is told to make the call.

More than once the left foot of disfellowship has been extended toward industry gadfly Evan Yares, who until a year ago was Executive Director of the Open Design Alliance. One year he was so bold as to hang around the host hotel as a registered guest but not a registered attendee, striking up conversations with anybody who would listen. One Autodesk VP asked me after a brief conversation with him, “Was that really Evan Yares?” It seems they had never met.
I doubt Mike Payne, co-founder of SpaceClaim (also co-founder of PTC and SolidWorks) will pull a Yares and show up at The Venetian Hotel next week, but you never know. If he already has the plane ticket and the hotel room, might as well enjoy Vegas.

Part of the marketing line at SpaceClaim Corp. is that the product is not a competitor to existing CAD programs, but should be viewed as complimentary, thus the rationale for trying to become an AU exhibitor. To that we say, yuk yuk yuk.

Being kicked out of Autodesk University is a rare and exceptional accomplishment — more people have won an Oscar than have been given the boot from AU, even though similar talents are required. We think such status deserves acknowledgement. So, on behalf of the staff and management of 3D CAD Blog, we award SpaceClaim Corporation our new trophy, which we will refer to from now on as The Yares Cup. We will award it when needed, not just for AU but for other industry events or when somebody really does a stellar job of outraging a CAD vendor. (For the record, we were the first winners of our own trophy. We still get anonymous phone calls late at night about the Bernard Charles Head Fake article. Especially from crabby English teachers who remind us the correct tern is “head feint.” To which we say, blow it out your Funk & Wagnalls. On the basketball court, it is a head FAKE.)

The Yares Cup, awarded for exceptional performance in outraging a CAD vendor.

The 3D CAD News team learned years ago to read all press releases backwards, from end to beginning. As a lesson to all PR vixens and wannabe CAD journalists (including many who now believe they are CAD journalists), we present our analysis of a recent industry press release. The lucky target is an announcement jointly issued by SpaceClaim and xPLM Solution GmbH.

SpaceClaim is the sneaky new Trojan Horse of MCAD. It is being passed off as a “breakthrough CAD-neutral modification solution” by the hyperactive chain-smoking Mike Payne, a Brit whose previous claims to fame include being a co-founder of both PTC and SolidWorks. I suppose planning to conquer all existing MCAD programs qualifies as “CAD neutral.”

The SpaceClaim team leaves a CAD-neutral gift.

xPLM Solution is a seasoned Teutonic codehaus, dedicated to solving the mysteries of PLM. As they adroitly say on their website:

 

Count on us to master together with you the challenge of optimizing and synchronizing your complex heterogeneous engineering environment and processes across your enterprise, partners and suppliers.

 

The staff at xPLM Solutions stands ready to synchronize your every heterogeneous processing whim. “SAP first; all others stand in line.”

Combine nervy Brit with gallant Germanics and you get a software match made in PR heaven. Which means somebody at the PR agency was randomly selected to pound out the release using the same fifty superlatives as every other announcement.

I am PR. Hear me roar.

There are several advantages to reading press releases from the bottom up:

+ The first two paragraphs of every CAD industry press release are filled with 40-word sentences that use such useless words and phrases as (quoting from the announcement) “the leading provider,” “comprehensive integration platform,” “leveraged,” and “an integrated and more efficient design and manufacturing environment.”

+ Approximately 50% of what a release says is true at the top turns out to be either not true or is scheduled to become true only after at least one business cycle passes.

+ Reading from the bottom postpones the reading of those dreary and obligatory quotes from executives who “are excited to partner” with somebody. They are always excited about this partnering, which is troubling.

The truth about executive partnerning; Fagin taught him well.

+ A good journalist always tries to turn corporate spin upside down to get to the truth. This method does it literally.

+ Every time there is a press release, several people labor over the exact meaning and placement of EVERY SINGLE WORD. Some executives lose days this way. All involved get so tired of this turd-polishing they let their guard down near the end and just let the facts speak for themselves.

A magic goose lays a golden egg. A magic dog lays the essence of PR.

+ Every press release ends with boilerplate text that appears on every announcement. If you like sucking on the table to retrieve spilled beer foam, you’ll like reading the boilerplate text at the bottom of a press release; more froth from the top.

Reading the SpaceClaim/xPLM announcement from the top down, the reader is told xPLM is building a “SpaceClaim PLM Integration Module” for “leading PLM systems.” Reading from the bottom up, we learn that it will only ship for various flavors of SAP and Infor PLM systems. It is available “on demand” for two varieties of Agile PLM (soon to be Oracle). No mention of PLM from UGS Siemens, Dassault, or even PTC, each of whom has more seats, just “others on request.” But then, the users of those “on request” PLM systems already have a CAD platform, unlike the “leading PLM systems.”

Wait a minute… If SpaceClaim is CAD-neutral, but its new PLM partner only works with non-CAD centric PLM systems, then it must be that SpaceClaim is trying to become the CAD system of choice in shops using these so-called “leading PLM systems.” If we had read this announcement from the top down, we might have been lulled into sleep and missed the real story. Another triumph for reading PR from the bottom up.

If you are dying to read the original, from top to bottom, it is on the SpaceClaim website.