Delcam Asian Technical Summit 2010 – Day 1

Clive Martel, the Managing Director of Delcam, gave an update on the status of the company. In 2009 Delcam welcomed it’s 30,000th customer and today they welcomed their 35,500th customer. According to Clive, during the recession Delcam continued investing in research and did not reduce head count like it’s competitors. Due to this Delcam had record sales in the first half of this year, mainly from grabbing market share from it’s competitors. Clive pointed out to a CIMdata report which stated that overall CAM sales declined by 15% in 2009. However Delcam’s sales dropped just 3% in the same year.

Vineet Seth, Delcam’s head of India and Middle East spoke about the state of Delcam in India. According to Vineet, Manufacturing has begun to make its mark in India since the past three years and Delcam has been growing correspondingly. Delcam entered India in 2000 mainly as a liaison office with three employees. Soon they opened local offices around the country and then started a development division as well. Today Delcam has 130 employees in the Pune office alone. In 2006 Delcam invested about a million dollars and moved into an owned office in Pune. They started an international support desk which now takes care of 75% of the support work load. According to Vineet, Delcam is considered as the largest CAM vendor in India while holding the leadership position in Automotive manufacturing applications.

Later Peter Beckingham, the British Deputy High Commissioner, presented a certificate to Delcam’s 35,000th customer who happened to be Southern Spars from New Zealand. I was quite surprised to hear the High Commissioner mention that Tata, an Indian business house, employs 60,000 people in the UK and that last year India was the the second largest investor in UK.

This was followed by a few product demonstrations. I found the demo of ShoeMaker 2011 quite interesting. ShoeMaker is Delcam’s new software product for designing shoes. Needless to say I had never seen anything like this before.

Another interesting demo was of DentCAD, Delcam’s dental software solution. Delcam has some fantastic triangle mesh modeling technology and the company is making full use of it in these specialty software solutions like the ones they have for shoe design and dental.

At last year’s ATS in Korea, Delcam announced a new Healthcare Division. On the stage this year were two hardware products, a dental and foot scanner. Delcam has already shipped 62 foot scanners since May 2010, which is pretty impressive considering that they were drawing up the specs of the scanners not too long ago.