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Major Software and Marketing Initiatives Mark ICEM's Plans for the Future, Following Management Buyout

Growth to come from existing strong presence in worldwide automotive body engineering sector plus new market opportunities

London. 13 February, 2003 - ICEM Ltd. Today announced its plans for the future of the company following the management buyout last year from its previous owners, PTC, Inc. Plans include an expansion of the company's already dominant share of the automotive vehicle body design and engineering software market and a move into the up-stream styling and design review and visualisation software sectors.

At a press conference held today in London, ICEM's senior management team outlined the company's history and the background to the management buyout, explained the company's vision and strategy for the future and previewed some of the more significant product developments due for release during the course of this year.

Lee Cureton, who formerly ran Topologies Ltd., the UK-based distributor of the ICEM Surf software suite and who led the management buyout with support from mezzanine finance provider Indigo Capital, is now ICEM's chief executive. He described the significance of the company's new-won independence, pointing out that over the past few years, the worldwide product development and manufacturing software industry has seen a lot of consolidation, which has not always been of benefit to customers and sometimes, not to the software vendors themselves either.

In the case of ICEM, he explained, having originally been set up in 1990 as a 50/50 joint venture between Control Data Corporation of the USA and Volkswagen-owned Gedas in order to market the results of a Volkswagen software development project, this operation was then acquired in 1998 by PTC, Inc., a leading US-based CAD/CAM software developer. Unfortunately, however, rather than the acquisition resulting in increased development and marketing activity for the ICEM software operation, it became just one aspect of the much larger, overall PTC offering, with the result that the ICEM Division found it difficult to make any significant further progress in the market.

"Nevertheless," he said, "during its years as a division of PTC, ICEM did gain valuable knowledge and the technical expertise required to effectively link ICEM Surf to next-generation, intelligent CAD systems. Furthermore, it didn't lose a single customer. Now we are an independent company, with strong financial backing from our investors, a new, experienced and highly motivated management team in place and a software development team and product set that are regarded as second to none by the market. We know where we want to go and we have a realistic plan and the finances in place to get us there".

Growth plans. With some 70% of ICEM's current business coming from the automotive sector, with the remaining 30% coming from the consumer durable products design market, the company's growth plans for the immediate future revolve around the worldwide automotive industry. Existing customers here include such names as the Ford Motor Company, including Jaguar Cars, Volvo and Land Rover; DaimlerChrysler Group, including Mercedes Benz and Smart; Volkswagen Audi Group, including Volkswagen, Audi, Seat, Skoda and Bentley; as well as suppliers such as Karmann, TWR, Pininfarina, Mayflower, The Budd Company, Bertone and EDAG among many others.

ICEM's products are used by these and other companies to capture the stylists' designs, usually from the clay model and to create and evaluate the accurate surface data required for the downstream detailed vehicle body engineering design process. The company is therefore well positioned for growth in this and other related sectors.

Three phase plan. Cureton explained that the company's growth plan, which will be delivered in three phases, depends on two parallel streams: sales & marketing and technical. From the sales and marketing standpoint, the first phase of the plan is designed to see the company increase its presence both in the automotive OEMs and in these companies' tier 1 and tier 2 suppliers through the establishment of a restructured and focused automotive industry sales and marketing organisation. This will be supported from a technical standpoint through the imminent introduction of new and enhanced software technologies, such as workflow integration, visualisation, parametric, intelligent data features, surface data association and PDM system links.

Phase two of the plan will see the company leverage these and other new technologies into additional areas of the workflow, such as vehicle styling, CAE and body design in order to close the gap that exists between the design and engineering processes. At the same time, the company will enhance its existing software capabilities for the downstream automotive press tool and die design sector.

Phase three will then see the company use its new technologies to develop its position in other market sectors, such as industrial design for consumer durable products.

"In the automotive sector", said Cureton, "our customers require data integrity from concept through to the release of data for detailed engineering design, plus an evolving toolset that addresses their current and future workflow needs. This is what our product development plans are designed to deliver. Meanwhile", he added, "the industrial design marketplace will benefit from new software tools with the accuracy and capabilities that are rarely seen outside the automotive Class A surfaces arena - but in a form to which the design community can relate."

"This means two things", he concluded. "First, ICEM will continue its reputation as an innovative, exciting software developer. And second, in addition to keeping our lead in the automotive Class A surfaces market, ICEM will also become the de-facto software of choice for the vehicle and product concept and design marketplaces".

New products on track. The company's product development plans follow a twin track modelling and visualisation software strategy designed to position ICEM software as the scalable toolset of choice, addressing the needs of both engineers and designers in all chosen market sectors. These developments, which are already well advanced, are designed to build on the company's existing software products in order to take it into new areas of the vehicle and consumer durable products development process.

In late spring of this year, Version 4.3 of the current ICEM Surf software suite is scheduled for release. This introduces a number of new capabilities and software modules, among them the PDM Link and Quick Surfacing modules.
PDM Link enables interoperability with all of the widely-used product data management systems in the market. Meanwhile, Quick Surfacing enables a surface model to be generated quickly and automatically from 3D scan data and then to be passed to other disciplines early in the development process to enable these to begin their own work.

The summer of 2003 will see the first release of a new product for free-form design and a viewer product for non-Class A users. This in turn will be followed in October by the launch of the next generation of ICEM Surf, which will be based on a new, object oriented software architecture. At this point, the next generation ICEM Surf will not only address industry needs for integration and workflow but will provide consistency and compatibility with the current version. The current ICEM Surf and next generation products will co-exist for the foreseeable future, offering total compatibility of data and of modelling methodology.

"Our plan is evolution, not revolution," states Cureton.

Significantly though, the launch of the new generation of ICEM Surf in October will mark the point at which the company's software development programme really starts to follow two parallel routes: one intended to satisfy the needs of engineers and the other, the needs of designers, using the same core technology.

The result of these software developments will be that in little more than a year since becoming an independent company, ICEM will be well on its way to achieving its aim of becoming the software of choice for designers and engineers in the automotive body and interiors design and general industrial design markets, worldwide.

About ICEM Ltd. 

With its headquarters on Chilworth Science Park near Southampton on the UK's south coast, ICEM Ltd. Is an independent company specialising in the development, sales and support of advanced software for use in the design and development of a product's visible and underlying supporting surfaces.

The company's software development group is based in Germany, while it has a network of sales and support offices and specialist distributors covering continental Europe, the USA and the Asia Pacific region.

The company's principal market sector is the worldwide automotive industry, where it includes most of the leading manufacturers among its customers, including the Ford Motor Company, DaimlerChrysler Group, Volkswagen Audi Group, Porsche, BMW, PSA and Harley Davidson among others, as well as leading automotive industry suppliers such as Volke, EDAG, Pininfarina, Bertone, Mayflower, TWR and The Budd Company, among many others. The company also has a significant presence in the consumer durable products design market, with customers such as Wilson Sporting Goods, Salomon, Ping, WMF and Toto among them.

www.icem.com

 

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