If you haven’t heard of AMC Bridge, don’t worry—you will.
If you work for one of the major CAD companies or an innovative CAD startup like Onshape, your company may already have been a client of AMC Bridge. In fact, they’ve been creating innovative solutions for CAD, CAE, CAM, building information modeling (BIM), product data management and product lifecycle management (PLM) companies worldwide for the last 16 years.
I recently had the pleasure of discussing CAD, the pool of talented engineering software developers in Ukraine and AMC Bridge’s overall impact on the industry with the company’s president, Igor Tsinman.
Tsinman has overseen the development of a company that is striving to prove that it is the vendor of choice for engineering software development and solutions. And the company has grown a lot in the 16 years since its founding.
This U.S.-based engineering software consulting firm employs more than 250 IT professionals in its development centers in Ukraine. Tsinman has three partners who together run a tight ship. There’s Michael Ludensky, CEO and CFO, who handles nontechnical business operations such as accounting, taxes, legal and contracting. Vadym Synakh, COO, runs the offshore operations and supports business development efforts, and Boris Shoov, executive vice-president, who helps develop business alliances and partnerships, directs the company’s market expansion and weighs in on the company’s overall strategic initiatives.
AMC Bridge is headquartered in Boston. At its development centers in Ukraine, the area has proven itself to be a hotbed of technical talent. There are more than 100,000 people out of the total population of 45 million currently in the IT industry. The country produces about 16,000 graduates each year with information technology degrees and many more with engineering degrees. Outsourcing services in Ukraine are growing 30 percent per year. The city of Dnipropetrovsk, where AMC Bridge’s main development center is located, was once home to the former Soviet Union’s intercontinental missile production project.
Five years after getting started in the engineering software business after graduate school in Ukraine, Tsinman moved to the United States and began work in 1992 at Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC) as a software engineer. He would go on to hold engineering leadership positions at an array of U.S. software companies (including Torrent Systems, TRUE Software, IDD Information Services and NPC Freight Services).
Tsinman has collected a mountain’s worth of experience with managing distributed projects and implementing complex design and architecture. He also focuses on streamlining the relationship and workflow between the business and technical parts of the company. With five years of experience in Ukraine and 20-plus years in the United States, Tsinman was absolutely key in acquiring AMC Bridge’s first clients in the path to a successful launch.
Aside from holding an MS in physics from Dnipropetrovsk University, Tsinman also has a U.S. patent on distributed system architecture and has published several papers on software development and advanced simulation systems. Over the years, Tsinman has become an expert in offshore software development and has given several presentations on effective outsourcing at the MIT $100K competition, MassChallenge, the Boston Product Managers Association and the 3D Insiders’ Summit.
Shoov also started his career as a software engineer at PTC (helping develop Creo), followed by numerous positions during his 18 years at Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS. Before software, Shoov was a mechanical engineer who designed and supported the manufacturing of automatic assembly lines for mechatronic devices. He also holds national and international patents in both software and mechanical engineering after earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering at Moscow State University of Oil and Gas.
Working in tandem, Tsinman and Shoov primarily focus on acquiring and maintaining client relationships, lead generation and proposal development.
With all of this experience and these qualifications, it’s not shocking that Tsinman and his partners have been able to build and lead a world-class technical team that works on the most demanding CAD/CAM, engineering and PLM applications. Since he is very familiar with the way American businesses operate and has a broad knowledge of relevant technologies, he is able to act as a go-between to articulate and translate requirements, ensuring that global client interactions are efficient and precise.
But in simpler terms, what Tsinman does is work with promising startups and connects them with established technology leaders to help them realize software ideas as commercial products.
AMC Bridge wants to be known as the global vendor of choice for engineering software development. AMC Bridge, like Tsinman, now has a tremendous amount of evidence to back up this claim in the form of many completed projects. From CAD, CAE and CAM to 3D printing, AMC Bridge primarily helps clients build custom solutions using the APIs of most industry platforms.Their flock of skilled programmers works with constraint solvers, 3D visualization and geometric modeling kernels, for starters.And you’ll recognize the startups and companies they’ve worked with. Here are just a few:
Engineering Applications
AMC Bridge has helped build engineering applications with clients such as Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS (since 2001), in addition to the best-selling CAD app in the world and different groups at Autodesk. This includes helping leverage cloud platforms and writing software for processing 3D-scanned point cloud data, automated cost estimation and object recognition and extraction. AMC Bridge also helped develop the IMAGINiT point cloud processing app, working on multithreaded processing and algorithmic development as well as object recognition.
Management
AMC Bridge creates solutions in just about any area of content and process management, including most business process management, enterprise resource management/materials resource planning, customer relationship management or product data management platforms, whether they be on premise or on the cloud.
For example, AMC Bridge helped one company build an online system for bidding on publicly funded projects. AMC Bridge did a combination of work that included cloud app development, document management and workflow as well as creating software for engineering data and drawing processing.
Another example is how AMC Bridge, using Tech Soft 3D software, worked with Aras to help them build a secure social collaboration and visualization tool. AMC Bridge also assisted Aras with developing Office Connector as well as EPLM (for enterprise) and several other apps.
Manufacturing
AMC Bridge has shown success in manufacturing as well. From prototyping to improving document flow, they’ve helped improve efficiency and profitability for their clients. In the last 16 years, AMC Bridge has worked with manufacturing companies from different industries, both large and small, to find and build custom software solutions.
Their experience encompasses a wide range of domains, including product design, cost estimation, product data management, procurement, simulation, production, metrology and product quality assurance, as well as PLM. For example, AMC Bridge worked with CloudDDM to help them develop their cloud app, which was a combination of a “retail store app” and 3D printing and geometry analysis.
Architecture, Engineering and Construction
In the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) sector, AMC Bridge has experience facilitating and building solutions for BIM and plant and civil engineering. For example, Flux worked with AMC Bridge on a multifaceted app for “future architectural design,” which combined geometry creation with built-in connections to leading authoring tools such as Revit, SketchUp and Rhino. They also helped develop Flux’s tools for rules-based generative design, involving Dynamo and Grasshopper as well as environmental factors, energy consideration, urban planning and so on.
AMC Bridge helped Vela Systems build a mobile platform for onsite inspection with advanced back-end reporting capabilities. Vela Systems was later acquired by Autodesk and served as the foundation for BIM360.
QA Automation Tools
The quality assurance (QA) automation tools AMC Bridge builds are employed for high-level productivity testing of mobile, desktop and Web applications. Being run by a cadre of experienced mechanical engineers and AEC professionals allows AMC Bridge to give their existing and potential clients a wide array of QA services to choose from.
Content Creation
A smaller part of what AMC Bridge does is serve those in need of engineering content—maybe you need some 3D models and 2D drawings created or manipulated. AMC Bridge also provides surface modeling and drafting, structural analysis and motion simulation services.
With a team of industry veterans, Igor Tsinman and his partners at the helm, and tons of young technical talent available to them in Ukraine, AMC Bridge is poised for explosive growth.
AMC Bridge has sponsored this post. They have no editorial input. All opinions are mine. —Andrew Wheeler