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Interview first
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q&a: five minutes with IntegrityWare |
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IntegrityWare, Inc. 13064 Trail Dust Ave. San Diego, CA 92129
General Information: info@IntegrityWare.com Polygon Toolkit Web Address: NURBS Toolkits Web Address: Phone/Fax: +1.858.538.3800
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This Q&A is with Gary Crocker, head of IntegrityWare, a surface modeling kernel developer.
upFront.eZine: Give me a bit of the history behind IntegrityWare. Gary Crocker: IntegrityWare started Sept '96 with the goal of being a geometry and graphics technology provider. Myself and the other founder (Dahjiun Wang) had worked for one of the major CAD companies.
upFront.eZine: Which company was that? Gary Crocker: Prime Computer, which became Computervision. We started working out of our houses (and still do) in San Diego CA. We believed there was a market for a quality geometry toolkit that was not full blown "modeling kernel". We felt that for every ONE application that was doing "geometric model creation," there were FIVE or more applications doing some sort of "post creation" analysis. These FIVE do not really need solids editing functions, such as Booleans and filleting. We decided to focus on providing tools to query and analyze existing geometric models.
upFront.eZine: As I understand it, you have a different business model than that of the Big Boys, Spatial and ParaSolid. Gary Crocker: We choose a royalty-free source code-based business model similar to that of GeomWare. In addition, we work closely with GeomWare to develop products complementary to their NURBS library, called NLib. Whereas NLib creates and edits NURBS curves and surfaces, we focus primarily on developing numerical tools that use existing NURBS representations.
upFront.eZine: So, how do you manage to compete with kernels funded by the two largest CAD companies in the world? Gary Crocker: By being part of a cooperative organization of small "virtual companies." We cooperate with:
SMLIb from Solid Modeling Solutions is a direct competitor to ACIS and Parasolid, and includes all of our libraries (GSLib/TSLib/POPLib), GeomWare's NLib, and a non- manifold topology solids engine. Nemetschek, for example, uses SMLib as the kernel for Vectorworks 9, an AEC CAD product. They really needed to do 1000+ box/box type Booleans per second to build and edit their walls, doors, floors, etc. parametrically. That sort of performance is impossible with traditional solids modeling. It really requires a polygonal modeling kernel that is highly optimized for performance. That is why we developed the polygonal Booleans and other polygonal tools now available in POPLib 2.0.
upFront.eZine: Where did the company name IntegrityWare come from? Gary Crocker: We decided that we wanted to form a "software company of integrity". The "integrity" part really stands for how we decided to run the business. We hope it applies to the software also, but that is not the intention. Both Dahjiun and I saw lots of problems in the software industry: a lot of selling of vaporware, slipping dates, making false promises, working inordinate number of hours, overhyping. We decided that we wanted to form a company based on Biblical principles. We don't announce anything until it is done. If we bid for a consulting job and it comes in under, we charge only for the time we actually put in.
upFront.eZine: Give me a quick overview of your product line. Gary Crocker: Our first product, Geometric Solver Library (GSLib), was released in early 1997. It works on NURBS curves and untrimmed NURBS surfaces, such as dropping curves onto surfaces and surface-surface intersection. Our second product, Trimmed Surface Library (TSLib), creates and queries trimmed surfaces, open shells, solids, and cellular topology. Our third product, Polygon Optimization Library (POPLib), creates polygons from trimmed surfaces and solids. Release 2 contains polygon modeling tools, such as decimation (reduction), Booleans, sectioning, and ray-firing.
upFront.eZine: Where is your market located? Gary Crocker: About half of our business is in Europe, 3/8ths in the US, and 1/8 in Japan or Korea. We occasionally compete with Parasolid or ACIS. The fact that our software is efficient and reliable, as well as being royalty-free has contributed to a great many of our sales.
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