That period included multiple roles from software engineering to release management and business development. That is where my professional passion in CAD data exchange was born. From 2004 and for the next ten years I worked at Intel, the US chip maker, in its software group where I supervised the development of the parallel software libraries (Intel Threading Building Blocks, OpenMP, and MPI). That experience roused my other passion in parallel computations. The mix of these two passions gave birth to the  CAD Exchanger project. I founded the company in 2014 commencing the most dynamic period in my life. We entered the market with the presence of strong competitors but our fresh look at modern technologies (including parallel computations and the latest C++ standards) allowed us to build robust and fast 3D data exchange solutions that help our users to work with ever-growing CAD models. Our tools are used by millions of users throughout the world and that fills us with both pride and responsibility. We are now entering a partnership with  NOVEDGE to let US engineers learn about our 3D software products, hoping they can use them to make improvements to this world.

NOVEDGE: What does CAD Exchanger do?

Roman Lygin:  Simply put, we help Engineers (including Product Designers and Software Developers) understand each other in a multi-CAD world. We provide software products and development tools to visualize and exchange CAD data in different formats on desktop, mobile, and cloud. Imagine a medium-sized engineering company from the field of Mechanical Engineering, Construction, Electronics or any other field. The company employs several Design Engineers, who work in SOLIDWORKS, Inventor, PTC Creo or Siemens NX, the costs of which easily reaches $10K per year. It's obvious that any project requires the collaboration of several such companies, each working in its own CAD system. This makes data exchange difficult or even impossible, forcing companies to adopt a new CAD system, which is an extremely costly and painful process. CAD Exchanger technologies unlock collaboration of Engineering teams, by providing robust conversion of 3D CAD data and easy-to-use visualization tools, dramatically reducing adoption and licensing costs

 NOVEDGE: Who are your typical customers?

Roman Lygin:  We serve two target audiences: Engineering teams and Software developers. Engineering teams benefit from desktop and web applications. Typically our customers come from Aerospace, Automotive, Electronics, Marine, Manufacturing, Robotics, and other heavy industries. We are proud to serve companies like NASA, Airbus, Apple, Tesla, Volvo, Siemens, and GE, among others. CAD Exchanger development tools are also integrated into software applications like CAD, CAM, CAE, 3D printing, AR/VR, and others. They enable reading, writing and visualizing 3D data. CAD Exchanger SDK is used in Altium Designer (leading EDA provider), SENER FORAN (shipbuilding), Simlab Composer (3D rendering application), CFTurbo (turbomachinery CFD application). We highlight some of our customers in our Customers section.

NOVEDGE: What sets CAD Exchanger apart from the competition?

Roman Lygin:  We have always believed in simple but important values for our users - ease-of-use, quality  and performance, and reasonable pricing. So we just try to focus on those and our users consistently rewards us. 

1.Great UX(user experience). Most engineering software is excessively complex. We go the extra mile to make our UI intuitive and easy to use, so our users can save time. Software developers appreciate the logically structured APIs and comprehensive documentation with easy-to-follow examples. It’s possible to build a working application on top of CAD Exchanger SDK in under an hour. 

2. Performance. We hold two patents in parallel computations. Our technologies  effectively leverage multi-core systems which allow CAD Exchanger to achieve superior performance. CAD Exchanger can scale up to 4-8 threads, speeding up heavy computational algorithms by 15x and accelerate the I/O processes by 2-4x. 

3. Cost-effectiveness. We have a transparent and easy-to-understand licensing policy. Some small businesses prefer subscriptions to lower the entry fee, while corporate customers prefer perpetual licenses, ensuring long-term economic benefits. Development tools are licensed on a royalty-free basis (which is essentially unique on the market), which makes them a preferred choice for enterprises and startups.

NOVEDGE: What kind of formats does CAD Exchanger support?

Roman Lygin:  We currently support 20+ key industry CAD formats including SOLIDWORKS, Siemens NX,  PTC Creo, Parasolid, STEP, JT and others. VR developers, digital content creators and 3D printing professionals would benefit from the support of mesh formats like FBX, STL, OBJ, glTF, X3D and others. The list is constantly growing and its up-to-date version is available here. 

NOVEGDE: What hardware set up is recommended?

Roman Lygin:This strongly depends on the average complexity of the CAD models to work with. A typical medium-level workstation or a professional notebook with 8+ GB RAM, 4-8 core CPU will be just fine for medium workloads. Of course, working with complex assemblies will require greater features. 

NOVEDGE: How do you make sure your users are happy with the product; how do you keep  up their evolving needs? 

Roman Lygin:  We receive multiple emails from our users every day. Those emails go directly to ourmarketing and support teams, and feed the development backlog after refinement. We are using a SCRUM process, so some inquiries can be addressed within a couple of weeks and delivered via an engineering build. Others can be put off to the later releases (which come four times a year, a frequency which seems the most balanced for our clients). I am on email lists and personally try to attend most phone meetings with prospects and existing customers to get feedback first hand.

NOVEDGE: What is next in your development? Anything new?

Roman Lygin:  In 2020 we have already rolled out three brand-new formats (PTC Creo, Siemens NX, 3MF) and are working on other popular ones. We are introducing several new modules and add-ons into our development tools portfolio (including Unity integration for AR/VR apps, mesh simplification for visualization workflows, Web Toolkit for web-based apps, Cloud API, and many more). The list is being compiled on our site. So feel free to subscribe to our newsletter to stay tuned for more news from us. 

On July 8th, NOVEDGE will be hosting a FREE Webinar featuring CAD Exchanger. CAD Exchanger helps over 150,000 engineers to build sectioning and exploded views, generating LoDs, and share data online. Register for the NOVEDGE Webinar  here.

Discover the CAD Exchange products on the NOVEDGE page and feel free to call us at 1-866-362-8970 with any questions or for assistance.