Dassault acquires ICEM

This is potentially big news for SolidWorks surfacing types: Dassault announced it is acquiring ICEM. ICEM is the holy grail of “class A” surfacing tools. It is what many of the big auto makers use for their serious styling, while using Catia or Unigraphics for the engineering work. Read Roopinder Tara’s Ten Links press release on the topic.

If I had to guess, I would say that Dassault keeps ICEM in the Catia family, just because they are both more of the “enterprise” type tools. I would guess that SolidWorks will not see the ICEM light of day, but I can always hope. They may throw us a bone here and there with a couple of badly needed functions such as curvature matching and anything that handles curve creation and control.

I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this as time goes on.