Huntsville, Alabama – The Home of Solid Edge

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Huntsville, Alabama is often called“Rocket City”. It has a fascinatinghistoryof hi-tech work inNASAand the space industry. It hostsCummings Research Park, the 2nd Largest research and technology part in the U.S. For those who know the town, it’s probably no surprise that recent“CAD society leadership award” winners Dan Staples and Bill McClurelive here too. This is where you can find most ofSiemens PLM’s Solid Edge组织。



In my last post,I laid out the key functional areas needed to build and manage CAD software development. Today, I’d like to look at what this means in real life by zeroing in on the Solid Edge organization. Like with real products such as computers, automobiles and cell phones, our software is made with components we build and components we “buy”. I quoted “buy” because many of our components come from other areas at Siemens PLM. For example, we useParasolidfor our solid modeling kernel. We make use ofTeamcentertechnology for JT visualization and PDM. OurFemap Expressuses Siemens PLM’sNX Nastranfor FEA solving.



The Huntsville folks then get to focus on problems that are closer to the customer. What does my sheet metal part look like when I unbend it? How do I display the data using the right engineering standard? What is the best user interface for working withSynchronous Technology(and vice versa – what will customers want in the next version of synchronous technology?)



Of course, we have all the functional areasdiscussed in my last post– developers, quality assurance, planners and educational media. The Huntsville office also has the Solid EdgeGTACsupport team. If you ever call into them, they are some of the nicest, most helpful people you will meet (and I’m not just saying this because their group will sometimes make waffles to share with the rest of the Solid Edge team).



Huntsville is also the location where much of ourbeta testingtakes place. In the coming weeks, we will be hosting a number of customers ready to try out our new enhancements, verify their real life processes are supported by our software and help us fine tune our release.