SpaceClaim Hits Its Stride

Back when it launched in 2005, SpaceClaim had a vision of giving 3-D direct modeling mass appeal, delivering technology aimed at engineers and non-engineers who weren't necessarily CAD jockeys. Nearly six years and seven software releases later, SpaceClaim is closing in on that vision. With its 2010 release, the company hit some impressive revenue goals, closed several major enterprise customer wins and along the way, was designated as a "cool vendor" in the product design and lifecycle management space by market analyst Gartner.

"We have truly gotten our stride as a company, moving from being a startup to understanding the market and enhancing our product to put in what customers and partners are asking for," says SpaceClaim Co-Founder Blake Courter. "When it comes to direct modeling and companies looking for a tool to deploy to all engineers to have 3-D become the lingua franca, we've clearly become the leader for that, and it gelled in the 2010 release."

With its range of ease-of-use capabilities along with new sheet metal design functions and capabilities around concept and bid marketing, SpaceClaim 2010 was better suited to help whole engineering organizations communicate in 3D. Among the key capabilities of the upgrade were direct 3-D sketching for points, lines and splines; the ability to power-select bodies by size for fast assembly de-featuring; and mechanism placement conditions to support tangency, ball joints and gears. The software, which up to this release was lacking in terms of sheet metal capabilities, was completely overhauled with a new form features and library, support for lightweight patterns and engraved cutout notes as well as the ability to bend flat patterns to 3-D sheet metal.