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Interview first
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q & a five minutes with Buzz Kross |
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Autodesk. 111 McInnis Parkway San Rafael, CA 94903 USA
General Information:
Phone: 415-507-5000 Fax: 415-507-5100
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Back in July, 2000, Robert Kross pre-empted Dassault's announcement that it planned to purchase Spatial for its ACIS technology. Back then, Mr Kross provided four reasons why the Dassault sale was good news for Autodesk, which you can read at http://www.upfrontezine.com/2000/Upf-209.htm . One reason was that it would become easier for Inventor and Mechanical Desktop to exchange data with CATIA. At the time, he speculated that SolidWorks would be under pressure to switch from ParaSolid to ACIS, and that Autodesk's Inventor might go dual-kernel one day -– with ACIS and ParaSolid -- as had some other CAD packages, such as IronCAD. Now it appears Inventor is going with 1-1/2 kernels: (1) ACIS frozen at v7; and (2) Autodesk's home-grown ShapeManager. Following the press conference, I talked one-on-one with Mr Kross about the day's announcement.
upFront.eZine: Your pr department indicated this was a hurriedly-called press conference. Why so? Mr. Kross: This week I'm at Autodesk University with 2,500 attendees. The story might start to leak out. We wanted to make sure everyone heard at the same time.
upFront.eZine: July a year ago, when you beat Dassault to its announcement, you liked the idea of better translation with CATIA. Will this still happen? Mr Kross: Exchanging drawings with CATIA is still available through SAT export. And there are third parties making direct Inventor-CATIA translation possible.
upFront.eZine: Was Dassault's purchase of Spatial the genesis for ShapeManager? Mr Kross: No.
upFront.eZine: It's not clear to me where this is coming from. How long ago did you start hiring employees, and what does Romuleus have to do with this? Mr Kross: Oh, this is just beginning now. We couldn't really start hiring any sooner than today's announcement, because word would leak out. Some of the staff are from Autodesk, some are being hired. Some have worked on Romulus, ParaSolid, and ACIS, and some are personnel provided by D-Cubed's consultancy software development business unit. [Mr Kross would not divulge the size of the ASM development team, but described it as the largest development team within Inventor, and under 100 employees.]
upFront.eZine: The office is located in Cambridge, England? Mr Kross: And in Novi, Michigan.
upFront.eZine: Is the ShapeManager product finished? Can you expalin to me how ShapeManager is being developed? Mr Kross: We had already been modifying the source code of ACIS. ACIS v7 is the core for ShapeManager. The first release is with the next Inventor early next year, with AutoCAD to follow later in the year. We plan to add enhanced blending and shelling, along with assembly in the kernel.ed for one of the major CAD companies.
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