That user group was our only support for years and years.' There is also a database of code generators that users have developed and contributed to the user group. I can pretty well take any machine and make a code generator to use in SmartCAM without much of a problem. 'I've looked at other packages, but I can get SmartCAM to do everything I need it to do. 'SmartCAM is what we use for everything' said Kathy Borneman, manufacturing engineer and CNC programmer for Oldenburg Group in Rhinelander, Wis. So loyal that in 2003, over 5 years after the last release of the product, more than 55 percent of the original installed base was still using the product, and more than half of those users were using SmartCAM as their only CAM software system. SDRC was bought by EDS in 2001, which soon sold off all of its CAM assets, including the rights to SmartCAM, to UGS, another company that had no apparent interest in doing anything with SmartCAM.Īll of that changing hands might not have been a problem, but it turned out that SmartCAM had developed an extremely loyal following. When SDRC realized it needed more CAM developers to work on its integrated solution, it began mothballing SmartCAM so that the CAM developers could work only on SDRC's package, and by 1998, all development on SmartCAM was stopped. They bought Camax in 1996 to extend its line of CAM solutions. About that same time Structural Dynamics Research Corporation (SDRC) in Cincinnati got a large contract with Ford Motor Company that included providing an integrated CAM solution. The company also became a very attractive candidate for acquisition and were soon acquired by Minneapolis-based Camax Systems - the makers of Camand Software.Ĭamax's goal was to have a company with a broad array of CAM offerings from little to big. It had become one of the dominant stand-alone CAM providers in the world. By 1994, the company had sold more than 33,000 licenses in 65 countries for its stand-alone CAM system.

In 1983, a CNC machinist and a salesman at a CNC job shop in Eugene, Oreg., who had both been experimenting with using the newly developed personal computers to automate CNC programming, got together, and developed a software package called SmartCAM and formed a company called Point Control. The saga of SmartCAM is a good example of that. Most of the time these mergers and acquisitions result in benefits for the software users as well as the software makers, but sometimes they can leave the users of a particular software package out in the cold with no place to turn for help. Sometimes it seems that mergers and acquisitions in the software industry occur almost as often as new software releases.

Smart cam cnc software