I hope all of you have had a great summer.With Labor Day fast approaching we are ramping up to have a busy and exciting Fall full of activity and announcements!I’ll have more about that in future blog postings.
A couple of pieces of great news came over the transom in the last couple of weeks that I’d like to pass on.The first one came in from Manufacturing Business Technology, where Right Hemisphere won one of their “2008 Innovation Insight Honorable Mention Awards”.For the record, the first place winner were actually co-winners: Emerson and Honeywell which offer distinct wireless network solutions. They offered up a case study at BP for a preventative maintenance solution that is truly very cool and has obvious value.Check it out
There were only four honorable mention award winners and Right Hemisphere is in good company there.Our award write-up features a compelling case study from one of our customers, Bell Helicopter.Below is a quote from the article that is consistent with the value that we see other companies realizing which factored heavily into why we were recognized.
“The technology saved 39,000 labor hours in development of technical publications for one aircraft alone. “That’s an 80-percent savings in the time to produce graphics of much higher quality, and that are much more portable,” says Lewis, resulting in netted savings in another project of 26,000 labor hours a year.”
You can find the entire piece on page 31 of the most recent (July/August) edition of the magazine and online
We also found out that we won an emerging company of the year award from a prominent analyst firm that required a fair amount of validation with our deployed enterprise customers just to be considered.If you can believe it I am not at liberty to actually tell you who it is from based on their copy write rules!Can you believe that?In my 20 years of being in the business I’ve never seen that one.Nonetheless its great to win again…even if it is a double-super–secret award ; )
I’ll end this post with 2 bonus pieces of news;
1. RH Video News Piece
There was a recent news piece out of New Zealand that is worth checking out about Right Hemisphere.It shows off some recent cool work that people are doing with our technology and provides insight into the company’s roots.As many of you know the company was founded in Auckland and we maintain a large development team there (Our corporate headquarters are here in California).Hey – We’re looking to add world class 3D engineering talent to the team!!New Zealand is a great place to live.Something to consider!Anyways check out the piece
2. Welcome Bob Merlo!
Any company is only as good as the quality of its people and RH is lucky to have a lot of great and talented people.I am very happy to announce that the trend continues with the addition of Bob Merlo who has recently joined the company and is running Corp Marketing.Bob is an industry veteran who has held executive level positions at Autodesk, ChipData and Exodus Communications.Expect to see Bob on Deep 3D in the near future offering his perspective on the market and the Right Hemisphere’s story.
Check in often as we’ll have new news and industry observations in the coming weeks.
Regards,
Rix Kramlich
Vice President of Marketing & Business Development
Aside from shipping the latest version of Deep Exploration last week, Right Hemisphere also shipped the latest version of our Deep View technology.Now as many of you probably know, Deep View is our free plug-in that allows you natively view and explore 2D and 3D product data in a wide variety of environments like HTML and Microsoft Office documents.Aside from adding major enhancements to the product, Deep View is now coming in two forms: Minimum and Complete.The Minimum version is simply the viewer, while the “Complete” installs an application that allows you to import and PUBLISH 2D and 3D product information into PDF and Office documents…for FREE!
The new Deep View Complete version will import a wide variety of files that you may have ready access to including: .3ds, dwg, cgm, .u3d, .dxf, .obj, .rh, 3dm, .wrl, Sketchup.Inside PowerPoint, for example, a new “Deep View” menu item will appear in the application itself that will allow you to insert 3D models and publish to PDF directly from PowerPoint.
It’s very EASY, very COOL and very FREE.What more could one ask for???
First off I would like to introduce myself…I am Lars Olson, Product Manager for Right Hemisphere’s Deep Exploration desktop client tools. A little over a year ago we spent two weeks on the road through out the United States presenting our technology through a series of day long seminars. This was not the first time we had done such an event, but it was the first time that we invited our enterprise customers to closed sessions following the seminars to get a reality check on our software products and solutions. Having been the Director of Service and Support for Right Hemisphere before moving into my role as Product Manager, I had plenty of input from our customer base about our products. This time was different because we had customers from diverse fields of manufacturing all together talking freely about what was important to them, and more importantly what problems they needed solved. It should come as no surprise, but there are lots of problems to solve…some easy, some very difficult. If you listen closely enough to your customers you will find common problems within manufacturing that need to be solved no matter if you making shoes or making mining equipment.
The key was to listen to our customers, and not create features and functions that our Product Management and Development think are important, but rather solve the business issues that are common amongst our customer base. Sounds obvious…but the large CAD companies have been missing the boat. Combining visual product data with business data for the distribution and publishing of this information to suit the customers’ business needs is what we do. I like to call it a “3D product and business data mash-up”. Every new feature and function in Deep Exploration and Deep View 5.5 was based on customer requirements, and in almost every case these new features where implemented to provide a solution to a manufacturing business issue.
Today June 16, 2008 is the launch of Deep Exploration & Deep View 5.5. The entire team at Right Hemisphere poured a bunch of blood, sweat and tears into this release, and we are extremely proud of these products. We understand that if we keep our heads down doing what we do best, and continue to listen to our customers, solving manufacturing business issues then our customer list will continue to grow as it has in the past.
For those customers that have purchased Deep Exploration 5.0 CAD or Standard Edition can upgrade to version 5.5 FREE for one year, or upgrade your licenses for a longer term at 50% discount through the end of September 2008. New customers can download a trial version today. For more information (Datasheets, Summary of Features, Supported File Formats) check out the individual product pages at www.righthemisphere.com
I encourage all of you to download and distribute the FREE Deep View 5.5 software. Stay tuned as I will be posting a variety of video demos and screenshots of these products in the coming days.�
The Holodeck of the future makes it’s debut in ver 1.0–a gesture recognition capable 3-D screen that does not require the user to wear glasses. Read more here and here
Let me introduce myself.I am Michael Lynch, CEO of Right Hemisphere, and I am very excited to be posting my first piece up on the Deep 3D Blog.I wanted to talk about our recent news about SAP that went public on Monday June 2, 2008 entitled, “Right Hemisphere’s 3D Visualization Technology to Integrate with SAP PLM”.
As I mentioned in the release, this is a significant milestone in our on-going and evolving relationship with SAP.We have been working very closely with the PLM team to ensure that the new RH technology is highly integrated into the new web-based version of the SAP PLM product to produce a truly next-generation user experience.In fact at last month’s Sapphire in Orlando the PLM team previewed some impressive examples of how Right Hemisphere’s technology will improve the overall product workflow.You can see the overall presentation and demo by going to the following site, registering and looking for the “Product and Service Leadership: Striving for Market-Leading Products” presentation at: http://www.sap.com/community/events/2008_05_sapphire_us/index.epx.
We have long contended that an integrated and infrastructural strategy is in line with how large enterprises use and work with data to support critical business processes. This announcement is a major proof point that the best way to make manufacturing businesses more effective is to bring the right product information to the right people in the right way.
As I said earlier, this is an evolving relationship and I am sure we will have more to share with you in the future.If you want to learn more, I would suggest that you attend one of our upcoming “Visual Enterprise” events later this month where we will providing more details about this agreement and how SAP-run businesses can incorporate visual product data using Right Hemisphere technologies in their current deployments as well as in their next generation product upgrades.To see the cities that we will be visiting and dates go to the following site for more information: http://www.righthemisphere.com/visualEnterprise/
Same location. Different universe. This week brought me back to Orlando for SAP’s annual Sapphire event for the America’s and this week it was all business.This is in contrast to last week’s COE event also in Orlando which was exclusively about product development.Let’s start off with SAP CEO Henning Kaggerman’s keynote on Tuesday that rolled out their new web based GUI.From an architecture perspective their NetWeaver SOA strategy is being extended to provide a flexible, extensible and web native application development and delivery platform.Very cool.And they even mustered an entertaining demo that showed off how multiple components of their overall technology set can be incorporated as extensible and dynamic widgets in the UI, which included a strong emphasis on integrating web-based Business Objects functionality.Also very cool.Some of the key points that Kaggerman made for SAP customers was that with this new approach would dramatically lower the overall total cost of ownership (TCO) and provide the ability to incrementally upgrade applications without having to upgrade entire systems.In many ways this seems like an obvious next step as it is consistent with what we see all see in mainstream SaaS services, but it is a significant development nonetheless.For the SAP partner ecosystem, it provides great opportunities as well.Right Hemisphere and CENIT have been delivering integrated solutions into the current thick client portal environment for some time now and the new approach will make it much easier to scale use-specific functionality across the larger SAP application environment much faster and at much lower cost for our customers.
I also sat through Hans Theilbauer’s presentation of their new PLM offering coming later this year that will be based on the new web GUI and it was very insightful.I’ve sat through a number of Hans’ presentations in the last year, but this is the first to roll out their new “Product and Service Leadership” solution category.It seems that SAP is positioning these categories as overlays to their existing silo’ed applications like “PLM”, “SRM”, “ERP” and so forth and aligning value around the benefit that their combined technologies can deliver.To back that up, Hans went through a series of examples that talked about “product invention, process innovation and product and service”.For example he talked about the ‘product invention’ of the piston powered propeller engine to facilitate powered flight, which is improved by ‘process innovation’ into the jet engine, and then ultimately migrates to ‘service’ which is reflected by GE’s shifting their business model by no longer selling product but charging only for usage. So what does this mean for their PLM product?Well, I’d interpret that as saying that the product will ultimately be tuned to the needs of the overall changing nature of the business of product to deliver cross-enterprise value in concert with other SAP-driven business processes.It also implies who the economic buyer is likely to be.Any large corporation’s investment in ERP and related business applications is a high multiple of what would have be spent on CAD tools and related systems.This business value positioning is a message targeted not only the VP of Engineering but equally to the CFO.So what about the product?In the short demo shown I can attest that they are leveraging the new web platform adeptly and are embedding CAD-sourced visual product data natively into multiple segments of the GUI across multiple toolsets that make up the solution. Overall it looked very clean, functional, and visually rich, which reflects a pragmatic approach to delivering rich data to drive PLM processes…but you’d expect a practical approach from SAP now wouldn’t you?We’ll keep an eye on this as this new product’s release will surely have an influence on the market.
Now I’d like to close my Sapphire summary on a lighter note.Having participated in countless corporate events like Sapphire over the years, you come to expect that there is some form of corporate entertainment.This year SAP really went big and pulled in an artist that you’d actually want to see…Eric Clapton! His show was awesome and the 15K+ plus Sapphire-goer’s (including myself) all had a great evening!All in all Sapphire 2008 was a class act.
In the immortal words of Julias Ceaser, “Veni Vidi Vici”
For those of you not fully brushed up on your Latin (myself included) that translates to, “We Came, We Saw, We Conquered”, which is how I’d characterize our excellent week out at the annual COE CATIA user event this week in Orlando, FL.Right Hemisphere’s booth was hopping at COE and had a really good buzz at the event.
First, let me introduce myself.I am Rix Kramlich and I am Right Hemisphere’s vice president of worldwide marketing and I plan to jump in here every once and while and provide insight into what we are seeing out there in the world at large.
So back to COE; In the last 6-12 months we have seen a huge interest in our solutions in the aerospace and defense market (A&D) and as you all may well know this is a market that relies heavily on the CATIA toolset.Many of our biggest customers made it to COE and we were impressed by the interest that we saw from all of the attendees there.Our speaking session was very well attended and we even hosted an after hours party with our partner CENIT (see the recent announcement).
Overall this year’s COE was very well attended and I’d say I saw about 1,000 + people in the keynote addresses on Monday, which interesting enough did not include a live appearance from Dassault CEO Bernard Charles.He sent a video-ed avatar in his place.Much of the rest of that keynote segment featured workflows relative to the upcoming v6 products which ended up taking about 50 minutes which was about 20 min too long and edged out most of the IBM speaker’s allotted 30 min of presentation time.Good keynote drama for sure.Net-net, though, is that the v6 demos focused heavily on how people would use and collaborate with CAD data for a wide variety of engineering focused and related downstream business purposes.Of course we have our own flavor of this story as does Adobe who was also attending COE.Certainly we’re seeing a critical mass evolving around this idea which is generating an overall awareness that solutions like Right Hemisphere’s exist for people looking for them in the market at large.
Our recent product announcements, customer wins and related good news was great for our presence at COE.We’re looking to go back big again next year when COE comes to Seattle!
Recently, I was struggling how to get dynamically loaded images to print in a Flex Report. I was using FlexReport (http://www.kemelyon.com/bts & http://flexreport.riaforge.org/) to handle the formatting, but couldn’t get the images to render before the Flex print rendering took over. While surfing around, I found a few classes (JPGEncoder and/or PNGEncoder) that you can use with the Loader class to load images. If you use Loader class in combination with an eventlistener you can create a custom itemRenderer that will ensure all your images get loaded before the print job starts.
Here is the source code for my ImageLoader itemRenderer which you can use in the PrintDataGrid: