SDRC

» see sdrc.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Structural Dynamics Research Corporation was founded in 1967 and spent its whole life in Milford, Ohio, about half an hour outside Cincinnati. The name is a finite element analysis name, and that is where it started: software for working out whether a physical thing would survive being used. By the 1990s it had grown into one of the four or five companies that mattered in computer-aided design, selling to automotive, aerospace, electronics and industrial machinery customers who bought seats by the hundred.

Its flagship was I-DEAS, a CAD/CAM/CAE system sold as one integrated package rather than as separate tools bolted together. The idea at the center of it had a name: the master model. You built one solid digital representation of the part, precise about geometry and materials, and every downstream activity read from that same object. The drafting and the machining instructions came off a single definition instead of off separate files that had been drifting apart from each other.

The second product line was Metaphase, which managed the files rather than the geometry. It began in 1992 as a joint venture, and SDRC bought in the rest of the shares in 1997. From there the company went acquisitive in a way that reads, in hindsight, like a company trying to buy its way out of a problem: CAMAX in 1996 for machining, CASE in 1997 for drafting modules it had been licensing anyway, Imageware in 1998 for surface modeling, Enterprise Software Products in 1999 for FEMAP, TD Technologies the same year for requirements management, and Sherpa Systems in January 2000 mostly for Sherpa's installed base.

~ the case file ~

~ the master model ~

I-DEAS had real adherents and a reputation for being the system where simulation was not an afterthought. The 10-K names its rivals, and most of them outlived it. Metaphase was up against Windchill from PTC and ENOVIA from Dassault, among others including I/MAN from a company called Unigraphics Solutions. I-DEAS was up against CATIA. Hold on to that Unigraphics name, because it belongs to the product that eventually absorbed I-DEAS. SDRC ran on the engineering workstations of the era, Unix first and Windows NT later, and platform independence was a selling point back when a customer might well have Sun in one building and HP in another.

~ the bad year ~

Revenue went up every year the last annual report covers: $285.3 million in 1996, $351.3 million in 1997, $403.0 million in 1998, $442.2 million in 1999, $451.9 million in 2000. Profit went the other way at the end. Net income was $38.1 million in 1996 and $28.0 million in 1999, and then 2000 closed with a loss of $27.7 million.

~ the impairment ~

The loss was mostly the acquisitions coming back. In December 2000 SDRC wrote down $44.7 million of goodwill and intangibles attached to TD Technologies, Imageware and Sherpa, and the same filing announced that it would stop developing the Sherpa products and stop selling Imageware except as a part of I-DEAS. Total special charges for the year were $47.3 million. At the end of that December the company still had 2,538 full-time employees, 705 of them in research and development.

~ twenty five dollars ~

EDS signed the merger agreement on 23 May 2001. SDRC shareholders approved it at a special meeting on 28 August, and the merger became effective on 31 August 2001, when a wholly owned EDS subsidiary named Emerald Acquisition Corporation I merged into the company. Every share of Class A common stock converted into the right to receive $25.00 in cash. EDS paid for the whole thing, options included, out of cash on hand, and the deal was not conditioned on financing. The company had counted about 35.6 million shares outstanding the previous February.

EDS also took Unigraphics private in the same move and put the two together as EDS PLM Solutions, which became UGS, which became part of Siemens. I-DEAS and Unigraphics were eventually merged into a single product called NX, and merging two mature CAD kernels means one of them supplies the future and the other supplies the customers. The master model idea went on inside NX. Structural Dynamics Research Corporation filed its last report with the SEC in September 2001.

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