The Evolution of Kubotek USA

Today, Kubotek Corporation (Osaka, Japan) is an innovative technology company comprised of three inter-related business units:

• Inspection Systems, focused primarily on flat panel display testing;
• Media and Network Systems division, focused on monitoring and public video display systems, and
• Creation Engineering division (Kubotek USA), for the support of integrated design and manufacturing solutions

Kubotek Corporation began as a medical electronics equipment company in 1979 and quickly evolved into a multidimensional industrial manufacturing with the development of a number of technologies and techniques. Industrial equipment, factory automation, image processing, optics and robotics are all areas that the inventive organization is able to address. In addition, in a related move, in the late 1980s the company developed computer-aided design and engineering software for its own use that it began to sell and share with other companies.

On the other side of the world, two U.S.-based inventors, Peter Smith and Livingston Davies, created their own product, a 3-dimensional (3D) digitizer they called the Perceptor. The Perceptor was a tool used to "trace" physical objects and capture 3D coordinates related to those objects. After searching the marketplace for appropriate software to work with their invention, they collaborated on a program that would eventually grow into one of the industry's most popular computer-aided design (CAD) software packages, CADKEY®.

As the software evolved, CADKEY provided 2D and 3D functionality, wireframe and surface modeling. Ease-of-use was very important to Smith and Davies, and the software's user interface borrowed heavily from AT&T usability studies being conducted at the time. For example, those studies showed that memory limits allowed people to remember no more than nine digits at a time so the structure of the interface was limited to no more than nine elements.

After a couple of years, it became apparent to the partners that their real accomplishment was this software, and they dropped the Perceptor and focused their efforts on further developing and selling CADKEY.

Meanwhile, one CADKEY customer was a graduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI.) Robert Bean was designing industrial equipment for large companies like Norton and Digital Equipment Corporation and discovered that the simple-to-use, flexible tool from "CADKEY, Inc." did 90 percent of what he needed it to do easier and faster than the CAD tool from Computervision that was available at the school.

As time went on, Bean began to create libraries of shortcuts and templates, so many in fact that he came to the attention of the CADKEY founders who urged him to consider marketing them to other users. In 1989, BayState Technologies was born as a third party developer and CADKEY reseller.

In the late '80s and early '90s, CADKEY was gaining momentum and competing against the major players in the market. In the mid '80s, Zenith Computer Systems sold thousands of personal computers to the military, all pre-loaded with CADKEY. Boeing purchased thousands of copies of the software for design and drafting work on one of its major aircraft projects. There the product was used alongside CATIA, a leading tool from Dassault, Inc. In the early '90s, CADKEY was twice named "Product of the Year" at PC Magazine, beating industry stalwart Autodesk. The company purchased DataCAD, an AEC product, to go head-to-head with Autodesk in that marketplace.

Emboldened by this success, in 1994, the company made a radical move. CAD as a category was too expensive, so the CADCAM, Inc. management team made the decision to dramatically slash prices in a move calculated to win marketshare. Accurately predicting a major market trend of the late '90s and early '00s, customers in droves purchased the product but the huge customer base couldn't replace the revenue lost due to the lower margins. Meanwhile, servicing and educating the much larger base was too costly as the new users were much less likely to be experienced designers and engineers.

In 1996, the management team at BayState, dismayed at the chaos at CADKEY, Inc., formed a partnership with Kubotek Corporation and others and raised the capital to purchase the assets of the company, including the CADKEY product and the customer rolls. Smith and Davies left to pursue other interests.

The new management team acquired FastSURF® advanced surfacing technology and added ACIS-based solid modeling to the CADKEY product line. In 1999, when the CADKEY architecture was starting to show its age, the team re-wrote the tool, including HOOPS, GEMS and ACIS, and keeping the ease-of-use and flexibility that had made the product a continued favorite among engineers and designers around the world. Unfortunately, with the product back on track, an adverse judgement in an intellectual property lawsuit related to the ANSI-standard look and feel user interface brought the company to bankruptcy. The appeals were exhausted in the summer of 2003.

Meanwhile, many thousands of customers were still using the product, and the CADKEY name was well established and recognized in the industry. Long time distributor and Japanese CAD/CAM pioneer, Kubotek Corporation had a vision of where CADKEY could play a major role in the future of manufacturing. In December 2003, Kubotek purchased the company, reassembled the primary members of the BayState management team and created Kubotek USA to further develop and market the product.

Kubotek Corporation has been involved in the CAD/CAM industry for decades and was involved in the development of the APT programming language, used to control machine tools. The Kubotek^{M3 (SM)} vision (Measure, Model and Machine) is an innovative strategy that will enable smaller design shops and manufacturers to compete efficiently in the global marketplace. In an M³ manufacturing environment, designers can capture real-world data, often by scanning a physical item, then change the item (customize, iterate, warp or distort it) and quickly produce the item, either prototyping to judge manufacturability, or to quickly produce a finished product.

In early 2004, the Kubotek USA team launched KeyCreator, the evolution of CADKEY. KeyCreator's NC programming capabilities were based on NC-Matic, a CADKEY integrated enhancement product, which Kubotek Corporation acquired from Numerical Technologies of Wixom, MI. CADKEY, the first truly 3-dimensional MCAD software for personal computers, in use worldwide by design engineers and manufacturing professionals since 1984 in the design of tooling, complex machinery, fixtures, molds, dies and products such as automobiles, airplanes, sports equipment and appliances, had returned to the market.