AVEVA has announced the acquisition of RealityWave, Inc., the Cambridge, Massachusettes maker of visualization and collaboration software used by many AEC, plant, and discrete manufacturing design software vendors. The AVEVA acquisition means that a competitor now owns an important component of the software sold to both discrete and process plant design firms by Autodesk, Bentley Systems, SolidWorks, and UGS, among others.
RealityWave’s patented VizStream Platform is used for streaming visualization of complex 3D models, 2D drawings, and associated information. The product uses hierarchical streaming, which essentially chooses to send the most important data first, allowing complex 3D data sets to be sent efficiently over any network connection. If enough bandwidth exists, the full data set comes across as required.
VisStream technology has been a key part of AVEVA’s Vantage Enterprise Net (VNET) collaboration suite for plant design and asset management. “This acquisition supports existing business requirements and secures a key technology,” AVEVA says in a press release.
According to the AVEVA announcement, the acquisition took place in March 2005. The UK-based AVEVA handled the news gingerly, because as a publicly listed company in the UK, they are required to downplay news that might attract US investors. The purchase price was £3.2 million (US $5.8 million). Most of RealityWave’s senior management will either depart shortly or have already left the company.