We had a SolidCAM booth, very close to the entrance, at the SolidWorks exhibition Partner area. It went fast and we launched the integration in SolidWorks at the SolidWorks Worldwide Reseller Conference in Jan 2002 at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas. We signed up as Solution Partner for SolidWorks and we started the integration. Since its launch in 1995, SolidWorks has become very famous, as the choice 3D easy-to-use solid CAD system. Our next logical candidate for integration was SolidWorks. So we decided to put the Autodesk Inventor integration on hold. However the Inventor APIs were not yet stable enough to enable us to do a good working integration. We had started already the integration of SolidCAM into the new Autodesk Inventor solid 3D CAD system.

From this event, I got the realization that AutoCAD resellers did not have the interest to handle a CAM solution. Also at one of the major conference sessions, we saw that Autodesk management was promoting another CAM system, that is not even integrated in AutoCAD. We were there for 3 days and we barely got one or two AutoCAD Resellers to get interested in our integrated CAM solution in AutoCAD. We had a stand there at the Partners’ exhibit area. This was at the One Team Autodesk conference in Nice in 1999. When the integration was finished, we decided to launch it at a major Autodesk event for resellers. We signed up as Autodesk ADN partner and started the integration. So I decided to integrate SolidCAM CAM functionality in AutoCAD.

AutoCAD was still at the time the quite famous and most prevalent 2D Wireframe CAD system, with limited 3D Wireframe capabilities.

Solidcam inventor