Intent on giving its customers more intuitive access to the vast corpus of product data inside and outside their organizations, Right Hemisphere this week released Deep Access, a new on-demand software tool that combines a visual user interface with cross-departmental and cross-company collaboration capabilities.
Right Hemisphere describes Deep Access as a media asset management tool — essentially a search engine for all the 2D and 3D product information a company uses. It serves as a Web-based module that connects to the vendor's Deep Server database as part of an enterprise deployment.
"Deep Access allows you to search for part data, collaborate within that environment with other stakeholders, and then publish it," Rix Kramlich, Right Hemisphere's vice president of marketing, told Managing Automation. In essence, the tool allows users to get product-based intelligence to all parties concerned, including those employees inside the business and independent suppliers and partners.
In a demonstration of Deep Access, the user interface appeared much like a typical file structure, with a toolbar of saved projects and folders on a left-hand sidebar and a main panel showing thumbnail images of dozens of component parts.
The software, Kramlich said, provides integrated access to product information across multiple product data management systems. A user who wants to mark up a CAD file of a component part with questions about the materials used to produce it, for instance, can search for that file through Deep Access, open it in a CAD-agnostic format, and type notes on the file itself. Once the user checks the file back into the system, an alert notifies all specified stakeholders that the file has been updated. An engineer at a partner company who uses a different CAD system, for example, can then log on to Deep Access via a Web interface and view the updated content.
Deep Access lets users search for files using file names, properties, or related metadata. It also supports the creation and cataloging of derivative design files — any new file based on the original. It can be configured to confine access to projects, parts, and assemblies to authorized members of the product development team. A user can also access a series of widgets to customize his or her Deep Access home page.
The combination of Deep Server and Deep Access can scale to fit most companies' needs, Kramlich said. At one company, he said, Right Hemisphere is under way with a project to process 56 terabytes of information — roughly equivalent to the full capacity of 560 new computers. In such a vast storehouse of product data, he said, "imagine trying to find a specific part" without a cataloging tool in place.
Kramlich said Right Hemisphere's most recent fiscal year showed 100% year-over-year revenue growth. The total number of customers has reached "many dozens," he said, although he did not disclose the actual figure.
One market in which Right Hemisphere has seen a strong uptick in demand is the aerospace industry, according to Kramlich. The challenge of creating planes from a disparate array of components and suppliers has led companies such as Boeing and Airbus — both Right Hemisphere customers — to improve the way they collaborate across vast distances and a phalanx of suppliers. Boeing's woes, in particular, point up the need for better processes for multi-site, multi-vendor collaboration.
Other industries of note include Right Hemisphere's core verticals of automotive, high tech, and industrial machinery, as well as the medical device and oil and gas sectors, where the company has seen growing demand of late.
Right Hemisphere benefited in early 2007 from an equity investment from SAP Ventures, the investment wing of software giant SAP. The two companies share a reseller, CENIT, and Right Hemisphere is a certified solution partner of SAP's NetWeaver platform, Kramlich said. In October 2007, PLM provider Dassault Systemes closed its acquisition of one of Right Hemisphere's competitors, Seemage, Inc.
Deep Access is available now, at $995 per user, with the per-user price scaling downward based on the size of the implementation.