In late 2013, Tech Soft 3D acquired Tetra4D, marking our official entry into the end-user market. For the first time ever, we now needed to learn to develop, support, market, price and transact in a high-volume, lower-price market selling mostly through VAR and CAR channels. Not necessarily an easy shift to make for a company with an 18-year history providing SDKs to developers — but we were excited for the challenge.
In the intervening year and a half, we’ve enjoyed a crash course in both how to manage acquisitions, and how to market 3D PDF technology through channels other than software developers. The result is we’re now stronger, humbler, wiser, and more convinced than ever that we made the right move acquiring Tetra4D – for both our SDK partners and our Tetra4D customers.
When we look back, our top three highlights include:
Growing our Knowledge of 3D PDF Use Cases
As Adobe’s trusted technology partner, we develop and provide the same 3D PDF technology found in Adobe® Acrobat® products. Members of our team have been instrumental in the ISO standardization of PRC, the rich native 3D PDF file format. We were among the first to offer a PRC-based toolkit for 3D PDF publishing. We know 3D PDF – and it made sense to expand that knowledge into end user territory.
But once we acquired Tetra4D, we gained an entirely new perspective on 3D PDF. We’re using this insight to shape our technology, which not only strengthens Tetra4D’s offerings, but also our HOOPS Exchange and HOOPS Publish toolkits, which are built with the same underlying technology. On multiple fronts, we’re now helping to drive the 3D PDF ecosystem.
An Immediate Entry into a New Marketplace
Tetra4D Converter helped us gain a foothold in the end user market faster than what would have been otherwise possible, and jumpstarted our ability to expand our end-user focused products. While we still had a lot to learn, our strong background in 3D PDF technology put us in a position to quickly understand how to move forward. As mentioned above, because of the existing Tetra4D customer base, we were able to hit the ground running, learning about the market and the existing product from those users who already relied upon it for their work. Since we were not starting from scratch and trying to reinvent the wheel, we’re able to spend our time and energy refining our technology – and extend our offerings based on the accumulative experience of thousands of Tetra4D users.
Yep, that word: Synergy
In the history of business, there have been a lot of dumb acquisitions, done for all the wrong reasons. In our case, having both the SDK and end-user technologies under the same roof only makes each stronger. For example, Tetra4D Converter is used within quite a few major enterprises and those enterprises are now discovering how they can build custom software using our tools (often with the help of the right VAR).
In short, bringing Tetra4D and Tech Soft 3D together strengthens both SDK and end user offerings by improving and fine-tuning our shared underlying 3D PDF technology, to make it even more critical to modern engineering workflows. Whether you build engineering software, or just rely on it to do your work, we’re working hard to make your 3D PDFs great.