Dear COADE Customer:
As mentioned on this blog, earlier this week, COADE was acquired by the Intergraph Corporation. It’s an exciting time for us as we think about the future, and the opportunities that it will bring to our products, services, employees, and ultimately to you, our customers.
Personally, upon closing this transaction, I felt a great deal of relief, not only because the long, arduous acquisition process was finally over, but also because COADE has once again taken the next logical step in our evolution. For 25 years we have been trying our best to reach every member of the plant design community with our solutions, our customer dedication and technical support, and our industry innovations – and now we have become part of a platform to help us do that on an even greater scale.
Since the news was announced, many of you have taken the time to reach out to me and my colleagues at COADE. I want to thank each and every one of you who has taken the time to do so. I appreciate both the compliments on our excellent service and support, as well as the concern for the well-being and future of our staff and products in our new home.
There really is no need for such concern. COADE’s reputation for quality service and products is well known in the industry – that reputation represents much of the value that Intergraph received in the transaction, and none of us can allow that value to deteriorate. Therefore we’ve made sure that the same people that you’ve been dealing with at COADE for years are staying on, in the same place, with the same operations and the same reporting structure that we’ve always had. We will make sure, that if anything, we ramp up to provide even more COADE-level service to our customer base, ensuring that our support infrastructure outpaces any sales gains. Feel free to continue to contact us, or your existing dealer if you prefer, as you have in the past.
As far as products go, of course we remain committed to all of our current products: CAESAR II ®, PV Elite (TM) and TANK (TM), and the CADWorx ® Plant Design Suite. These products constitute an excellent fit with those of Intergraph. Obviously we are excited about the chance to implement the same industry-leading design/analysis integration (for which COADE is best known) between the SmartPlant ® Enterprise suite and our analysis products. And CADWorx – a tool ideally suited to small to mid-size projects, owner operators, brownfield projects, and the AutoCAD® community – complements SmartPlant ® by giving Intergraph the most comprehensive set of plant design offerings over the broadest spectrum of projects, customers, and industries. You can rest assured that all of COADE’s development staff is still here, hard at work, working on the next release of these products -- but now we have access to many more corporate resources which will help us move forward even faster, in even more directions.
In summary, I know that COADE customers are among the most loyal in the industry – we’ve worked hard to make you so. I’d like to thank each of you for that loyalty in the past and at the same time be among the first to welcome you as a new Intergraph customer. I hope you share our excitement about what the future can bring.
Regards,
Thomas J. Van Laan, PE
Senior Vice President
COADE, now part of Intergraph