Spatial Unveils CGM

In a press release issued today Spatial announced the general availability of Convergence Geometric Modeler (CGM), the modeling kernel used by Dassault Systemes in CATIA V5/V6 and SolidWorks V6, whenever that is released. The company also announced the availability of 3D Interop CGM, a set of data translation libraries for CGM.

In my conversation with Spatial’s new CEO Jean-Marc Guillard back in October last year, he said to me, “Earlier the purpose of Spatial was to see if the component business was a viable one. We now know that it is viable and profitable. It is now time to leverage Spatial experience and V6 technologies to serve the requirements of the industry.”

This is his quote from today’s press release: “These products provide not only an excellent opportunity for independent software vendors developing next generation applications to take advantage of the latest technology, to address evolving market needs, but they also allow native geometrical data compatibility with V5 and V6. Together this opens a new set of opportunities to the ISV community“.

For many years Siemens PLM (or rather, the then owners of the Parasolid modeling kernel) earned royalties for every seat of a CAD system that was sold which used the Parasolid modeling kernel, SolidWorks being one of them. Dassault Systems has decided to change that with SolidWorks V6. Also a while ago (see “Really Big News From Dassault Systemes And Spatial – Part 1“) Dassault Systemes decided to start licensing CGM to other CAD vendors and application developers.

I know that the team at Spatial has been working very hard to make this a reality and today they announced that one of their customers, Mitsui Zosen Systems Research Inc., a company that is building an advanced 3D software solution for industrial machines, is going to release their CGM based product in the second half of 2011.

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