Troy, New York-February 10, 2000 - STEP Tools, Inc., the forerunner in developing STEP-integration solutions for the global marketplace, today announced that Alibre, Inc. (Richardson, TX) has set up a direct web link to STEP Tools' Free Online Translation Service, a component of their STEP Repository solution. Alibre purchased STEP Tools' ST-Developer and ST-ACIS products for the development of STEP-enabled applications and data translators for Alibre Design (www.alibre.com), an innovative mechanical design service based entirely on a ground-up Internet architecture. This is the first design service in the marketplace to base its native file format on the open STEP standard. Over one million end users utilize product data applications built with ST-Developer. The STEP Tools product line is used by the world's foremost firms to leverage STEP technology to facilitate the managing, sharing, and exchanging of engineering product data inside and outside the enterprise.
"We chose to use STEP as the Alibre Design native file format because it is widely accepted as the preferred mechanical design standard for product interoperability," says Paul Grayson, President and CEO of Alibre. "Our partnership with STEP Tools provides our customers with the ability to leverage STEP as the standard to share designs created in a variety of different CAD systems and reuse data throughout the design process."
"As a technology partner of Alibre, Inc., STEP Tools is very pleased to expand the exposure and usage of our free STEP online translation services to the engineering/manufacturing sector taking advantage of powerful new Internet services like Alibre Design," states Dr. Martin Hardwick, President and CEO of STEP Tools, Inc. "Alibre has responded to the international popularity of the open STEP data standard by utilizing it as their native file format to represent and reliably transport their 3D model content worldwide. Alibre can take immediate advantage of the strides being made in the STEP standard development that surpass the limitations of geometry-based data translators of today to include product definition, assemblies information, manufacturing process characteristics and details about cutting tool and related fixtures in a database."
STEP Tools was the first software developer to offer a free Web-based data translation service in 1995. Since that time, there have been over 8000 data translations using this online tool. The service has evolved and expanded to import and export a variety of CAD files to STEP, Parasolid XT, ACIS-SAT and XML. Graphic file formats such as JPG, GIF and VRML are also supported. Files can be directly uploaded to the site via the most popular web browsers.
STEP Tools' integrated suite of tools and libraries cover every aspect of STEP implementation and drastically minimize the effort needed to move databases and applications into compliance with ISO 10303 STEP and other standards using EXPRESS information models.