In Stay Sharp Episode 139, Digital Product Series – Tech Soft 3D, co-hosts Juliann Grant and Jonathan Scott welcome Jonathan Girroir, Technical Evangelist at Tech Soft 3D. The trio discuss the foundational software company in the digital engineering space, delving into what Tech Soft does, why that’s critical, and how it is that they provide everything you never knew you needed.
Why Tech Soft is Unique
Girroir describes Tech Soft as “the company that everybody uses but nobody knows, especially in digital manufacturing.” Surprisingly, for a company few have heard of, their products may be on more desktops than any other digital engineering or 3D provider. As he puts it, Tech Soft creates “the bricks that people build software applications out of.” The company’s portfolio of components addresses needs from data ingestion and data publishing to graphics, simulation, and analysis. They make and sell graphics engines, data-translation tools, simulation tools, meshers, and more—everything you’d use to build a CAD application.
Jonathan Girroir, Technical Evangelist at Tech Soft 3D
Tech Soft products are used by more than 750 different companies, from big companies like Aras, Dassault Systèmes, and Autodesk to small startups like Shapr3D and nTop. Girroir explains they primarily sell to independent software vendors (ISVs) in any arena that isn’t games or entertainment. Outside of the ISVs, they also sell directly to big manufacturing enterprises—like aerospace, automotive, or heavy machinery—that build their own internal software. Many of those, such as shipbuilding or mining manufacturers, are using Tech Soft components for 3D printing.
One theme throughout the trio’s discussion centers on TechSoft staying ahead of the market’s needs. A use case Girroir gives is visiting an aerospace manufacturer a decade ago and offering Tech Soft’s then-beta cloud product. The manufacturer was uninterested at the time, but recently came back for the package, because they’re now ready to digitize everything. He says, “It was exciting to help that company really become model-based and 3D on the shop floors as opposed to 3D on a computer on the shop floor that you still print out plans from to go do manual inspection or maintenance.”
Tech Soft occupies an interesting position in the digital engineering marketplace, because they also partner with large platform vendors for the ability to mutually resell products, including Autodesk, Dassault, and Siemens. Siemens, for example, resells Tech Soft’s graphics and data-exchange tools, while Tech Soft resells Parasolid, the number one solid modeling kernel. One result of those partnerships is that Girroir and team also end up connecting some of the big companies so they can work together. “Our customers are our competitors sometimes,” he says. “It’s messy. What’s really exciting is we get to bring those people together … to be able to facilitate that and move the industry forward is a really unique place for Tech Soft.”
Tech Soft Products
Reselling aside, the company focuses on underlying tools, the components that are put into other applications, which they develop in-house. Those fall into two categories: data access and visualization. With data access, they bring both breadth and depth to read/write tools. First, they provide the ability to import files and data from more than 30 different CAD file formats. “We make it as easy as possible and reduce that friction to bring data into your application,” Girroir says. Data access depth comes from the amount of rich engineering data associated with the simple visualization of a surface, including “metadata and assembly structure, and product manufacturing information, and unique IDs and features, and kinematics and more metadata and material data,” he adds.
Visualization components enable the data to be seen, and Tech Soft’s suite of graphics tools is specific to engineering and being able to view, work with, and stream models and their data. Beyond those two categories, Tech Soft also offers packages of various tools with a specific-language wrapper around them, which enable developers working in C#, JavaScript, or any other programming language to integrate them easily into their own development environments.
Asked about the ubiquitous impact of AI, Girroir explains that Tech Soft is coming at AI with a different perspective. “Tech Soft, because we’re lower level, the way we think about things is what foundational technology will these applications need in the future? They don’t need a chatbot. You figure that out. And so we look at it at a much lower level,” he says. Their newest “Hoops” product, Hoops AI, provides a set of tools to researchers to build machine-learning algorithms. “Everyone’s trying to figure this out and tool up,” he adds, “One of our challenges, for better or for worse, is we’re not just providing tools, but we’re providing education and direction.”
Learn More About Tech Soft 3D
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including why Girroir says Tech Soft is like a spider sitting in the middle of a web of connections, how the company is “eating their own dogfood,” why the fact that they see more data than anyone means they’re at the leading edge of how companies might work with AI, and more.
Be sure to check out Stay Sharp Episode 139: Digital Product Series – Tech Soft 3D and join us each week for a new podcast.
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