OEM Case Study – Mc4 Software

How to survive the sharks – A small success story

When Autodesk terminated their Agreement, MC4 Software replaced AutoCAD OEM by a customized OEM version of ARES in just 3 months.

The Challenge

In summer 2011, I spent my vacation in Myrtle Beach, the golfer’s paradise. I was happy with my family and proud of how we were surviving in the biggest economic storm since the 1930’s. Our small company was solid, without debts, with one of the best products in the World of MEP engineering based on AutoCAD OEM, one of the best graphical engines.

Returning to the office, I found a fax from Autodesk in my inbox declaring they have decided to terminate the OEM agreement with us. For convenience “effective ninety (90) days after the date of this notice”.
You can imagine the panic had immediately taken possession of our small company! At the time, we were ITC commercial member trying to run the program as an application of their IntelliCAD 7. The product was young, rather immature and it was not ready at all to be marketed from there to 90 days so I started looking for another appropriate solution.

ARES makes a difference

Fortunately, I remembered that a few years before I had a correspondence with Mr. Gräbert from Graebert GmbH about a new product in their development: ARES. Within a few hours, I downloaded, installed and started to test ARES’ main features. I was pleasantly surprised to see it met all the requirements we were looking for and could add a few features to our palette.

1) ARES was developed utilizing Qt, the same environment we were using,
2) It made use of OpenDesign libraries we were already compatible with,
3) It was very fast with both 2D and 3D graphic rendering,
4) It had all the basic functionalities (entity snap, entity track, 3D cursor),
5) It made available the ACIS 3D modeler,
6) Plus: It had a crisp, clean interface.

Rebuilding the solution

ARES really seemed to be the ideal candidate to replace AutoCAD OEM. The next day, I made a request to gain access to the SDK. Graebert positively replied within one or two days. Except for the AcEdJig class that we had to write on our own, the SDK was complete, so that on October 15th we had our solution running on ARES OEM. When I gave it to our testing department, I got a tremendous reaction. “Where is the ribbon bar?!”, they asked. Well, thanks to the circumstances, we had also the time to write a ribbon bar that was able to load the AutoCAD CUIx files!

Making it short, on December 1st we had a new product that looked like the one based on AutoCAD OEM.

Bright future ahead

Mc4 customers are excited because:
1) Stability of the new product is higher than the previous product.
2) The new program is lighter than the older one, mostly due to the lightness of the new engine.
3) MC4 is excited about the business results achieved and the independence gained.

Obviously, there have been fans without ifs and buts that have struggled to adapt to the new situation, but we did not have disaffections. The nearly two thousand licenses sold in almost two years proof that.

↑ The MC4 Suite is an integrated, stand-alone software package powered by ARES for HVAC, Energy Analysis, Fire Protection and Boiler room design.

About the ARES OEM CAD engine

As a leading developer of CAD software, solutions, and services, Graebert is recognized as a true innovator in the CAD industry and has over 30 years of technology expertise.OEM solutions have been Graebert’s specialty since 1994 when we introduced our first CAD kernel. Nowadays our technology is used as the CAD engine of many platforms with a total installed base of nearly 5 million users.

OEM solutions have been Graebert’s specialty since 1994 when we introduced our first CAD kernel. Nowadays our technology is used as the CAD engine of many platforms with a total installed base of nearly 5 million users.ARES is the only OEM CAD engine on the market that is compatible with Windows®, Mac®, and Linux platforms.

ARES is the only OEM CAD engine on the market that is compatible with Windows®, Mac®, and Linux platforms.Developers can utilize our DWG-compatible CAD kernel to create cost-effective CAD solutions and receive a full technical support from Graebert.

Developers can utilize our DWG-compatible CAD kernel to create cost-effective CAD solutions and receive a full technical support from Graebert.

↑ Mc4Suite: A full suite of Software to design energy-efficient buildings

About MC4 Software

Giuseppe Cozzupoli is the founder and CEO of MC4 Software.

Founded in 1982, MC4 is a Software company based in Italy and USA specializing in Calculation & Design Software for HVAC, Energy and Noise Analysis, Solar Thermal Energy, Fire Protection and so on.

Mc4 Software offers a highly integrated environment for Design & Calculation to more than 7,500 professionals in Italy, USA, Spain, France and more countries worldwide.