An Introduction to CoCreate

Unlike most other user meetings, the CoCreate user meeting did not start until 11:30. I took the opportunity to get in a morning run through Sindelfingen, Germany, past a beer garden, through the quaint old town center, with shops, bakeries with pretzels, cafes and then to its outskirts past Daimler-Benz' largest manufacturing plant. Mercedes, headquartered in nearby Stuttgart, spreads its factories and offices around Sindelfingen as well, and I am told is also the town's biggest employer. However, the town does not seem to suffer too much from its industry, as do American cities. In fact, only once did I hear the clanging of metal. Certainly, my lungs appreciated the crisp, clean air.

William Gascoigne, CoCreate CEO, addresses the crowd of over 360 users in Sindelfingen, Germany.

I asked if Daimler-Benz was a CoCreate customer? Not even one seat, said Dr. Thomas Roser, CoCreate's Europe Marketing Manager and the emcee to the one-day user meeting. "Not our type of customer." CoCreate's niche is high tech electronics firms, a specialty that harkens back to its birth, when it was an in-house tool of Hewlett Packard. But even within such firms, CoCreate counts most of its 11,500 customers (and over 100,000 seats) in Europe and Japan. Though CoCreate maintains a small office in Ft. Collins, Colorado, the US market is still one that needs to be cracked. Only 15% of its users are in the western hemisphere, compared to 47% are in Europe, and 27% in Asia

Consequently, its user meetings are held only in Japan (650 attended the last one) and in Germany, where on this day over 360 were present.

Dynamic Modeling

If CoCreate had a company face, it would be grinning ear to ear. Recent media coverage has been favoring history-less solid modeling (the chief practitioners being CoCreate, who calls it "dynamic modeling," and Kubotek) and quotes from well known industry writers lit up the big screen. Customer presentations were also on message as customers extolled the "flexibility" CoCreate gives them and the ability to quickly change existing designs. One customer (Xenon) explained how designing a new assembly machine from an existing design made them ever so thankful of having CoCreate to do it with, as opposed to the (far more common and way less flexible) history-based solid modelers.

Comments

[JohnH]

Don't forget IronCAD. They support both dynamic history-free modeling and parameteric history-based modelling. (many of the IronCAD folks worked with HP/CoCreate in the early days)

CoCreate has been doing history-free modeling for almost 20 years, since ME30. This is not a new thing. For many years, they have struggled to convince the market of the value. I guess it's because everyone is so brainwashed about parametrics and "capturing design intent". CAD geeks love to build their highly "intelligent" models, despite the fact that their models fall apart as soon as they have to make an unanticipated design change, or worse yet, they have to hand over the design to some poor fool who isn't intimately familiar with the 50-bazillion complex constraints built into the model.

[Roopinder Tara]

There was not a press component, as CoCreate seems to prefer to meet with press one on one for the most part. I got the feeling that having press attend a user meeting was something they were new to.

[ralphg]

Roopinder...

Is this event strictly for CoCreate users, or is there a component for the press?