The Power of the Platform: What Combining Toolkits Can Do For You
By Jonathan Girroir • The idea of bundling a few products together for a discount isn’t new or ground-breaking. Cable, phone, and internet companies have been particularly keen on pushing it for decades. For application developers looking to license multiple software development kits (SDKs), platforms are much more than simple product bundles, and can revolutionize your development experience. In this piece, we share some of the reasons why bundling component technology can help application developers create a better, more reliable product more cost-effectively.
If you’re looking to learn more about what component technology can do for you, read our piece featured in DesignNews discussing the topic.
The Benefits of a Platform
Exactly which development platform is right for you will depend entirely on your unique application development needs. With that said, here are some of the most important benefits to getting more of your toolkits from one vendor in the form of a platform.
Better, Easier Development Through Powerful Integrations
One of the most important benefits of an SDK platform is the prebuilt integrations between toolkits. While many developers use multiple software development kits (SDKs) as building blocks for their applications, this creates a significant challenge - stitching those toolkits into a usable product. For example, licensing HOOPS Web Platform would allow someone creating a web-based engineering application to solve their CAD data import/export, 3D visualization, and 3D publishing/data sharing needs all from a single vendor, with toolkits designed to work together as seamlessly as possible.
For those who license individual SDKs from many vendors, creating software bridges moving data between the unique parts is time-consuming, difficult, expensive, and hard to maintain. Keeping all the parts working together with version updates, new features, and API updates is problematic at best. An update to one of your licensed toolkits might cause problems with the bridge you've spent so much time and effort developing. Overall, your team will spend significant resources on creating and maintaining integrations between the SDKs you licensed.
Getting more of your component technology from one vendor reduces these issues. The integrations between our toolkits are built on years or decades of development experience from the people who created them in the first place. Our updates and new features are planned carefully with existing integrations in mind. We have built decades-long relationships with partners who license multiple of our SDKs and rely on them to work together efficiently and reliably.
Tech Soft 3D’s focus on integrations extends beyond bridges between HOOPS or CEETRON products within the platforms themselves. The breadth of offerings we provide in engineering application development has allowed us to facilitate strong working relationships with some of the biggest players in these spaces, such as Autodesk and Siemens. This allows us to offer powerful, polished integrations with these products, and even resell some of them directly.
Our relationship with Siemens allows us to offer a polished bridge between Parasolid and our HOOPS products. Additionally, we resell Parasolid, so HOOPS users looking to take advantage of both products can work with a single vendor. We also resell Polygonica, a mesh modeling toolkit from MachineWorks, and provide integration code for HOOPS SDKs.
Convenience – Billing, Support, & A Discount
Working directly with one vendor allows your team to consolidate billing, work directly with one support team, and receive a cost discount. Exact cost will vary by vendor, but here is an overview of what that would look like at Tech Soft 3D.
Billing & Discounts
Our pricing is highly dependent on your unique circumstances – your distribution method, internal vs external use, revenue expectations, scale, and more. Our pricing consists of two components, a partnership fee, which starts when you sign a contract with us, and a distribution fee, which only begins when your application ships.
As an example of the benefits of our platforms, the partnership fee for one HOOPS SDK starts at 33K USD. HOOPS Web Platform and HOOPS Native platform, which contain 3 of our SDKs each, have a partnership fee starting at 55K USD, far less than licensing them individually. Additionally, the HOOPS Platform, providing you with 4 of the HOOPS SDKs, has a partnership fee starting at 66K USD. Our newest toolkit, HOOPS Luminate, is available as an add-on for any of these platforms or HOOPS Visualize by itself.
Support
While licensing any of our SDKs gives you access to our team of experts, engaged executive team, and a Partner Development Manager dedicated to you, your support benefits are amplified when you go with one of our platforms.
As discussed, some of the biggest challenges when working with SDKs are integration support, format and version updates, and the overall development complexity. By choosing one vendor for multiple SDKs, you ensure the support team are experts in streamlining your application, from one set of features to the next. Instead of liaising with multiple vendors on bug fixes, incompatible updates, and different integration processes, your team can work with one group of developers who know the toolkits inside and out.
What Platforms Does Tech Soft 3D Offer?
The benefits to a platform that we discuss can apply to many vendors who license SDKs. To give you the context for this discussion, here is a brief overview of the platforms we offer and the individual products they contain.
At Tech Soft 3D, we offer two platforms that allow our partners to license 3 SDKs at a reduced cost. HOOPS Native Platform and HOOPS Web Platform are comprehensive toolkits designed to support advanced software development for desktop/mobile and web-native applications, respectively. Users can also take advantage of the full HOOPS Platform, licensing 4 HOOPS toolkits.
HNP contains HOOPS Exchange, HOOPS Visualize, and HOOPS Publish, while HWP contains HOOPS Exchange, HOOPS Communicator, and HOOPS Publish. Our newest HOOPS product, HOOPS Luminate is available as an add-on to any of these platforms.
Which Tech Soft 3D Platform or SDK is Right for You?
While platforms and SDKs individually can be transformative in your application development process, choosing the right one for you is a difficult process. We value creating strong, strategic technology partnerships with those we do business with, and a key part of that process is learning about you and your needs. Get in touch with one of our experts below and let us help you choose which platform or individual SDK is best suited for your application development needs.
