CAD Society Announces Bill McClure and Dan Staples of Siemens PLM Software as joint winners of the 2009 CAD Society Leadership Award

A legacy of excellence and industry leadership in developing the Solid Edge 3D CAD solution recognized

Denver CO -The CAD Society today announced that Bill McClure and Dan Staples, from Siemens PLM Software’s Solid Edge® software team, are joint winners of the CAD Society’s 2009 Leadership Award.

The CAD Society Awards acknowledge the contributions made by individuals that have affected and developed the CAD, engineering, manufacturing and architecture software industries. The Leadership award is presented for outstanding technical and business leadership in the CAD industry, and focus and dedication to the needs of CAD users.

Both Bill McClure and Dan Staples have been behind the CAD system known as Solid Edge since it started as an R&D project in 1993. Then owned by Intergraph, Solid Edge started life as ‘Project Jupiter’ and demonstrated some highly innovative ideas in 3D, well before 3D on a PC was mainstream. The software was sold to UGS in 1998, with both Bill and Dan staying on the Solid Edge team as both its strategic and development leaders.

Solid Edge has remained a steady performer in the CAD industry for the last ten years. However, last year, it was released with new design paradigm – synchronous technology – the first history free feature based modeling capability in the world, which was developed by a team at Siemens PLM Software that included the Solid Edge team.

“The introduction of synchronous technology in Solid Edge caused the industry to stop and stare,” says Ken Feitz, CAD Society Treasurer and Industry Veteran. “While other 3D CAD systems have featured similar tools before, the whole issue of combined persistent dimension driven and non-history-based 3D data in the same model had been much ignored by the major CAD vendors. Synchronous technology in Solid Edge represented a major turning point in the industry – something we haven’t seen for many years.”

Continues Feitz, “We decided to award this to both Bill McClure and Dan Staples, since their combined technical and business contribution to the industry through Solid Edge continues to build and lead in the market. The CAD Society is proud to recognize these gentlemen for their Leadership of the CAD industry.”

“We really appreciate this recognition from the CAD Society and industry,” said Bill McClure, vice president of Velocity Series product development, Siemens PLM Software. “Dan and I are pleased to accept this award on behalf of our whole development team and support staff as well as our loyal customer community. We have always developed Solid Edge for engineers by engineers and this has never been as evident as with the most recent release of Solid Edge with synchronous technology. With this new history-less feature based approach we look forward to keeping Solid Edge on the forefront of design technology for years to come.”

“It is exciting that the industry sees the importance of moving forward and innovating – not just accepting current limitations and levels of productivity,” said Dan Staples, director of Solid Edge product development. “While much work remains to be done to completely leverage synchronous technology throughout the many areas it can be applied, I have no doubt that it will prove itself to be ultimately the most productive way to model and revise designs.”

The awards will be presented at COFES (Congress On the Future of Engineering Software), this year scheduled for April 16-19 2009 in Scottsdale, AZ. Past winners of this award include: Carl Bass, Jay Sunyogh, Dana K. “Deke” Smith, Robert McNeel, Tony Affuso, Tom Butta, Jon Hirschtick, and Bernard Charles.