CASTOR
The integration between additive manufacturing software tools is not considered good enough by most end users, according to CASTOR CEO Omer Blaier.
Blaier tackled the issue of software integration on the latest Additive Insight podcast, in which he also discussed application identification and the potential for more M&A in the additive manufacturing space.
CASTOR has made application identification its speciality and works with many other software companies to link its own capabilities with their upstream and downstream tools. The company was founded off the back of Blaier’s experiences working at Objet and Stratasys, where identifying suitable applications was recognised as one of the industry’s biggest challenges. Now that CASTOR is an established player in the market, Blaier notes that the integration between software products – of which all additive manufacturing users will lean on several in their workflows – needs to be much better.
“It’s a hard task because the standard of a user from a software perspective is very high,” Blaier said. “It’s not like in the standard of additive manufacturing where I’m ready to compromise on a lot of things when I’m operating a printer. For software, my standard is Google, Microsoft, Apple. That’s my standard. This is how I would like my things to work; in a click of a button. And no, those dots [in additive manufacturing] are not linked together in a good way today.”
Blaier went as far to say that additive manufacturing software tools link ‘in an awful way,’ after also acknowledging the state of the additive manufacturing industry in the past couple of years. In that time, there has been a host of mergers and acquisitions activity, with the bulk involving hardware suppliers as the market consolidates.
The additive manufacturing software space consists of an array of companies working to address several different challenges within the additive manufacturing workflow – and as has been established, they don’t always talk to each other as well as a manufacturer would like.
What Blaier sees is that users of additive manufacturing would like to get their software tools, ideally, from one provider. Blaier listed a myriad of companies working to this end, among them the likes of Siemens, Hexagon, Oqton and Stratasys, vying to position themselves among the first choices for AM software. For a smaller company like CASTOR, who perhaps doesn’t have the scope – or maybe even the intent – to grow so quickly as to challenge them, the task is to integrate with each and every one of them, meaning all users would have access to its application identification tools.
“There are a lot of solutions that different companies are providing, and at CASTOR, we’re integrating with them,” Blaier said. “We’re trying to focus only on parts identification, what part makes sense out of a lot of parts at once, and connect CASTOR to what comes before that, which is the PLM/ERP system, and to connect CASTOR with the deep data analysis tools. I think the user eventually wants an end-to-end solution from a single focal point that can provide the user the whole umbrella.”
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