by Susan Smith - Managing Editor Each AEC Weekly Review delivers to its readers news concerning the latest developments in the AEC industry, AEC product and company news, featured downloads, customer wins, and coming events, along with a selection of other articles that we feel you might find interesting. Brought to you by AECCafe.com. If we miss a story or subject that you feel deserves to be included, or you just want to suggest a future topic, please contact us! Questions? Feedback? Click here. Thank-you!

Fundamentally the first thing that Steelhead does is bandwidth reduction, by taking off all the redundant traffic. "In an architecture firm we usually find that's between 75% and 90% of the WAN traffic. 75% of your WAN traffic will just disappear. That helps you avoid bandwidth upgrade."

Secondly, on a WAN you're subject to delay. On a LAN, when you have a computer in your cubicle and a server down the hall and the distance is 100 feet, the data moving between your client and your server moves at the speed of light, so the time it takes is almost zero seconds. Clients and servers have very chatty conversations, and they talk to each other in a very serialized step by step way. Over a short distance this works just fine and files will open almost instantaneously. If the server is 100 miles away the client and server still have to have that same conversation, but now each step of that conversation, instead of taking a tenth of a millisecond, might take a hundred milliseconds, so instead of something opening right when you click on it, you click on it and nothing happens. "Most people think they need more bandwidth but the real problem is the latency, round trip time of these packets and the chatty conversation is slowing down the throughput of the network."

"We fix this by radically reducing the number of round trips taken by the client to the server by intercepting them," said Saldich. "We have knowledge of how the client and server are going to behave and essentially remove most of the round trips that otherwise would be taken."

The result of all that is an increase in the speed it takes to do something on the network.

A Customer Speaks Out

Craig Mathews, CTO at McKim and Creed, said that one of the problems his engineering and geomatics firm had was transferring data between offices. McKim and Creed has 15 offices throughout the Southeast. Some of the files that were being passed over those connections took a lot of time. "One of the big problems we were trying to solve was, if work is being done over multiple offices, then we wanted all the files to reside in one location so we could help prevent issues of overriding files."

They did some extensive testing using different file sizes and large numbers of files and found they got a doubling of performance the first time a file was passed through the Steelhead Appliance, and then somewhere around 50 times speed improvement the second or third time. "So it's significantly improved the time it takes to send and receive files between offices," he said. The company has had the appliance in place for just two months.

Acquisitions/Alliances/Agreements

RealityWave Inc. and Noumenon Consulting Ltd. announced that they have entered into a partnership that integrates their technologies, RealityWave's VizStream®, and Noumenon's XMpLant®, into a complete solution for collaborating with large project databases, throughout the project's lifecycle.
IMSI®, developer and publisher of precision design and consumer and business software solutions, announced its plan to offer design collaboration functionality through its strategic partnership with PDMOffice. This partnership makes available PDMOffice design collaboration functionality to TurboCAD users within their TurboCAD environment, allowing them to share documents with their peers, visualize CAD models (250+ formats supported), manage project timeline and related activities and hold design reviews in online meetings.

Meridian Systems, an enterprise solution provider for optimizing the plan, build and operate phases of real estate, construction and other infrastructure programs; and JumpStart Wireless announce a marketing and technical alliance. JumpStart is the developer of the most advanced wireless application platform for businesses.

Announcements

Companies in industries ranging from publishing and information management to printing and PC manufacturing are partnering with Autodesk to embed the Autodesk® DWF™ file format into their products. Using the Autodesk® DWF™ Toolkit, many technology partners, including HP, Oce, Bluebeam, PLP Digital Systems and US Reprographics Network and ReproMAX, have developed applications that read or write multi-sheet drawings in DWF format.

VersaCAD 2005, built for Mac OS X, will be announced at the World of Concrete show in Las Vegas Jan 18 to 21.

The Dimension 3D Printing Group, a business unit of Stratasys, Inc. announced that there is less than one month left to submit a part for "Extreme Redesign: The 3D Printing Challenge," a global design and 3D printing contest for high school and secondary students that will award $18,000 in scholarships to individual and team winners.

Final submissions must be postmarked by Jan. 31, 2005. A panel of independent judges from various industries will judge final entries on the basis of creativity, usefulness, part integrity and aesthetics. A total of 12 individual and team winners will be selected in February 2005 and will receive $2,500 or $1,000 scholarships. Four first place winners will travel to an awards ceremony at the National Design Engineering Show in Chicago. Complete contest rules and submission information is available at www.dimensionprinting.com.

Autodesk Inc. announced that it is pleased to continue its 13-year sponsorship of the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition, which kicked off January 8, 2005, at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester. Recognizing the importance of training the engineers of tomorrow, Autodesk is increasing its commitment to the organization by donating more than $24 million in software and sponsoring the FIRST Robotics Competition Championship.

Appointments
Meridian Systems announced the appointment of Marty Listberger to Director of Channel and Inside Sales. In this position, Mr. Listberger will grow and support the marketing and business development efforts of Meridian's global reseller network, helping to extend the market leadership of Meridian's industry standard project management solutions.

New Products

Intergraph Corporation is shipping SmartSketch 5.0 parametric 2D precision design, production drafting and diagramming software. An alternative solution for companies dealing with forced retirement of Autodesk products, the 5.0 version's new features include the Line Style Editor, expanded interoperability, Image Integrator enhancements and a number of other improvements.

Wind2 Software announced that its Resource Scheduling and Budgeting software is now available as an integral part of the company's end-to-end solution for government contracting. In addition to enterprise-wide resource management, the integrated system manages all aspects of contract proposals, timekeeping, day-to-day project management, invoicing and reporting. It is 100% compliant with DCAA requirements.

@Last Software, Inc., a Boulder-based developer of 3-dimensional design software, announces the availability of SketchUp Component Libraries for use in the film and stage, interior design, landscape architecture, and architectural and mechanical design industries.

During his keynote Tuesday at the Macworld conference and expo, Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced a Mac computer that almost fit into the palms of his hands and that is Apple Computer Inc.'s latest answer for Windows users wanting to switch platforms.

ArchVision, Inc. announced the immediate availability of two new RPC (Rich Photorealistic Content) Moving People libraries. The new Moving Casual People Volume 3 and Moving Business People Volume 2 each include 16 people clothed in traditional casual and business attire respectively. Each RPC contains a 20 second motion loop that provides seamless integration into animations. As with all RPC Content, users of these new collections can take advantage of the RPC plug-in interface for ease of placement and editing.

eCopy, Inc., provider of document distribution and integration solutions, announced the availability of Version 2.0 of eCopy ShareScan OP (Open Platform) for Canon's MEAP-enabled imageRUNNER multifunctional peripherals (MFPs). eCopy ShareScan OP V2.0 enables organizations to easily add color documents, as well as black and white, to their information lifecycle by scanning them directly into their document management systems, e-mail, and other enterprise applications such as SAP, Oracle, and Siebel.

Best Software announced that commercial contractors, specialty contractors, owners, and developers can get a first-hand look at the latest innovations for Timberline Office at the World of Concrete trade show and conference, which includes the newly introduced Technology for Construction January 18-21 in Las Vegas.




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-- Susan Smith, AECCafe.com Managing Editor.

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