Throughout April we’ve been travelling through America to visit our customers and resellers and SOLIDWORKS too.
DriveWorks CEO, Glen and VP, Maria traveled out to America with Chris, Pre-Sales Engineer and Gemma, Business Development.
Their journey started at Engineer 3D! a great event organised by DriveWorks Reseller, Graphics Systems.
We were platinum sponsors and had a booth to showcase DriveWorks software. Glen delivered a lively presentation entitled “Configure My Product”.
Keynote speakers were Gian Paolo Bassi, CEO of SOLIDWORKS and Erik Buell motorcycling superstar.
Tuesday night’s welcome reception was great fun with darts, table soccer (football for us Brits) and giant jenga with Gian Paolo Bassi and GXSC’s Dave Mandl playing very active parts!
From there, Maria and Glen travelled to Arizona where they had a truly memorable tour around a customer’s facility. Maria said it was really exciting to hear how they use DriveWorks.
Meanwhile Gemma and Chris also started on their trek across America. First they visited Alignex, in Minneapolis, who were hosting a couple of DriveWorks events, and caught up with their Sales Team before visiting Twin City Fans to see how they are using DriveWorks.
Maria and Glen then made their way to COFES. It is the engineering software industry’s only annual think tank event which brings executives from design, engineering, architectural, development and technology companies together to understand the role engineering technology will play in the future.
The event is a mix of keynote presentations, technology suite briefings and round table sessions led by industry analysts. Delegates included senior execs from all the key CAD players.
With Onshape choosing to take a technology suite this year there was much discussion on the topic of cloud!
The theme was continued on the Friday ‘Evening Under The Stars’ when all COFES guests were taken to the Arizona Wing of the Commemorative Airforce to explore a B17 Flying Fortress and other planes of a bygone era.
Guests toured the amazing engineered sheaths of metal with an an elaborate array of exposed wires and cables. They will be the subject of another post soon to be posted on Maria’s blog!
After a weekend exploring Chicago, Chris and Gemma visited DriveWorks Reseller CATI and a couple more customers before heading off to Detroit to visit a new DriveWorks Partner… more on that in a future blog post!
Chris particularly liked their office – that apparently had more beams than our Barley Store, weekly nerf gun fights and ping pong tables.
Before flying back to the UK, they then visited DriveWorks Reseller, Fisher Unitech to share What’s New in DriveWorks 12 with them and to find out how their DriveWorks customers are getting on.
From COFES, Maria and Glen went to Boston to spend a week at SOLIDWORKS HQ.
With their own desk in the middle of a busy office, they got chance to catch up with lots of people from SOLIDWORKS to talk about what we’ve got planned for DriveWorks.