Patrice Tiberi, who joined TopSolid 36 years ago in what he still calls his "first job," now sits on the management committee and drives the company's strategy and development roadmap. He opened with a snapshot of TopSolid today: a French CAD/CAM/ERP software editor that has steadily expanded its catalog to address the full scope of Industry 4.0.
With a product range spanning mechanics, construction, building, and wood — covering everything from furniture and interior design for hotels, boats, and homes to complex metal machining — TopSolid aims to cover the full breadth of manufacturing needs, from quoting a part to designing, machining, and managing it.
The product family reflects that ambition: TopSolid'Design for 3D design, drawing and structural calculation; TopSolid'Cam for metal machining on machines ranging from the simplest to the most complex, including robotics; TopSolid'Wood and TopSolid'WoodCam for wood design and manufacturing; TopSolid'Steel for building and façade design; and dedicated solutions for sheet metal cutting, stamping, and forming.
A pivotal moment came in 2004, when TopSolid completely rewrote its software — making it one of the most recently re-architected 3D CAD/CAM platforms on the market. Faced with the question of whether to build geometry interfaces in-house, the team chose to rely on a specialist instead. That decision marked the beginning of a relationship with Spatial that has now lasted close to two decades.
Today, the Spatial SDK is integrated at the very core of TopSolid's platform, with every vertical application built on top of that foundation. The company mainly relies on 3D InterOp to communicate with all the major CAD systems on the market — a critical capability, since most TopSolid workflows begin with loading a part, whether it comes from a competitor's software, a neutral format, or a polyhedral model. More recently, TopSolid also integrated Spatial's MeshGem component to support structural calculation, simplifying a complex development task.
Patrice was clear about the business benefit: "It relieves us of a burden." Building and maintaining CAD interfaces has become a profession in its own right, and outsourcing that layer to a long-term specialist frees TopSolid's teams to focus on what differentiates them — their customers and their domain expertise.
Looking ahead, Patrice pointed to three challenges shared across the industry: AI and how to integrate intelligent services into CAD/CAM products; automation, driven by the constant pressure to produce faster and better; and eco-design — mastering energy consumption, material usage, and recyclability, and giving designers the ability to compare materials on environmental criteria. All of this, he emphasized, has to be integrated at the core of any modern 3D solution.
His verdict on the partnership, summed up in just three words? "A beautiful partner."
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