I don’t think anyone would argue that the last few years have been pretty eventful. Modern industry is facing critical challenges, as design tasks become increasingly complex. Fortunately, we are seeing the development of new technologies that are allowing us to rise to the challenge. Techniques like rapid plant modeling for control applications, robust formulation techniques for automatic model generation, and the application of symbolic computation technology are accelerating the modeling process while ensuring correctness and sound scientific principles. The world of engineering is changing, and I’ve been fortunate to watch some of these developments first-hand.

For some time now, Maplesoft has been at the forefront of these changes, developing new physical modeling engineering technology. The first real validation of our work by industry was the announcement of our partnership with Toyota, followed shortly by the creation of the Plant Modeling Consortium early last year. Over 150 organizations, including most of the major automotive OEMS and other leading technology and solution providers, have committed to employing these new mathematics-based design techniques in their work.

The next major milestone was the release of MapleSim, first as a pilot project in July last year, and commercially in December. Today marks yet another one, as we announce the release of not one, but two new products, namely MapleSim 2 and Maple 13. This is the first time in our company’s history that we have launched such a combination of high performance technologies and I believe it will truly change the way people work.

The combination of the two core Maplesoft technologies presents an opportunity to modernize the process and make significant savings in cost and time. Because of their strong symbolic computation capabilities, MapleSim 2 and Maple 13 can find solutions that no other system can, allowing engineers and mathematicians to solve harder problems and achieve better performance. Many improvements in these new releases will expand the possibilities for approaching your work. For instance, the multibody capabilities of MapleSim have been extended, so that you can now create very realistic 3-D animations from your models. This makes it easy to visualize the topology and dynamic behavior of the system. Another example is the new results manager, which helps you to organize and compare results from multiple simulations.

We have truly exciting times ahead, and I am looking forward to seeing how this new chapter plays out. I’d like to invite everyone to join us as we explore these new directions.