At the Digital Plant Congress in Würzburg, Germany, Siemens Industry (www.siemens.com/industry) announced that it has acquired VRcontext (www.vrcontext.com), a company specializing in 3D visualization and training software for displaying engineering data in the shipbuilding and plant construction industries. VRcontext International S.A. was founded in 2000 and is represented around the world by numerous strategic partners, dealer networks and a branch office in Houston, Texas, USA. The parties did not disclose details of the purchase price.
Walkinside 3D visualization software is currently in use in plant operation, maintenance and servicing in more than 200 companies in over 30 countries. Whatever the system used, the software directly accesses all plant information to display the current status of a plant in visually appealing, realistic 3D graphics.
VRcontext has specialized particularly in remote offshore installations for the oil and gas industry. "The integration of the Walkinside 3D visualization and training software of our long-standing partner VRcontext into our industrial software portfolio will benefit our customers significantly. Using intelligent 3D models can make plant engineering and operation safer and more efficient in a great many sectors of industry," says Eckard Eberle, ceo, Siemens Industrial Automation Systems Business Unit, to which VRcontext will be assigned.
Recent years have seen the Siemens Industry Automation Division extend its position in the industrial software market with the acquisition of UGS in the United States (2007), innotec in Germany (2008), Elan Software Systems in France (2009), the Brazilian company Active Tecnologia em Sistemas de Automação and Vistagy in the US (2011) as well as the German IBS AG in 2012 and Perfect Costing Solutions GmbH, all of them leading industrial software suppliers in their respective fields.
Edited by Grant Gerke, Digital Managing Editor.
