San-Francisco-based 3DPrinterOS, specialists in cloud-additive manufacturing management software, has just appointed Michelle Bockman as Chief Executive Officer as part of its strategy to grow in the enterprise customer space.
Early on, due to the perception in the industry regarding FDM printers and associated printer farms, 3DPrinterOS found universities and educational institutions as customers willing to try the product and help drive early stage development. One of their most prominent early customers is Duke University that started with 10 printers, 10 students and 3D printing operators. Today, the university boasts over 6000 students and over 150 printers all managed on the 3DPrinterOS platform, which has encouraged nearly one of every two Duke students to 3D print at least once. The company’s platform now has over 20,000 university students from MIT, Harvard, Purdue, Berkeley and Yale. Interestingly, the company compares its early stage development at universities as akin to that of Apple and Microsoft, when industrial mainframes were preferred over personal computer systems for enterprise customers from Sun Microsystems or Cray – or even Honda’s early beginnings in selling moped’s to students.
In the enterprise space, OEM’s struggle to build integrated, flexible, operating systems, focusing more on highly specific machines and enterprise environments than platform or industry agnostic solutions. In fact, 3DPrinterOS’s break into the enterprise space came primarily because Bosch decided to drop collaboration with Autodesk in developing the Dremel 3D printers, as the latter chose to merge its Spark platform into Forge. Bosch, needing a cloud solution for its Dremel platform, reached out to 3DPrinterOS and became its first major enterprise customer. Now, 3DPrinterOS’s customer’s include Google, Microsoft, John Deere, NASA, and governmental defence agencies, and through its partnership with Slant3D, also includes Amazon, Haddington Dynamics and Nickelodeon.
“We have given direct 3d print access to over 100,000 users on college campuses and saw a 70X utilization rate increase with 3DPrinterOS vs. the industry standard. Now we will give the same access to every enterprise in the world to enable their 1000’s of engineers to direct print without any other human interaction with the machine. Ultimately we wish to give access to over a Billion people in the world,” said Dogru.
The company sees its platform as the missing piece in accelerating large-scale enterprise adoption of 3D printing and related-technologies, explaining that it is “an advanced manufacturing operating system software solution for enterprise organizations. Much like how the operating systems for the personal computer and smartphone allowed for many hardware and software manufacturers to accelerate adoption of the technology, and revolutionize the information age, 3DPrinterOS is aiming to revolutionize the digital manufacturing age. The operating system for manufacturing is the missing link for the industry to achieve mass adoption.”
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