Avatech Merges With PlanetCAD

Avatech's new CEO, Donald R. "Scotty" Walsh, said the all-stock deal was valued at approximately $20.6 million. No further details were disclosed.

Walsh, who was named chief executive Dec. 2, said Avatech boosted its product development staff by 11 as a result of the deal.

"We are primarily a reseller of AutoDesk software and the services that we put around it," he said. "What we added with the merger was some products of our own and the staff to develop those products."

PlanetCAD offered a quality-assurance solution called Proof Positive that Walsh said enhances and extends AutoDesk's Inventor software. Proof Positive, which Avatech will now develop and market, works with Inventor "to make sure that the engineers don't leave anything out" of the product they are designing, he said.

Avatech's clients are primarily in the manufacturing, building design, civil engineering and geographic information systems fields. The company recently was authorized to sell into

higher-education institutions in 48 states, an Ava-tech spokeswoman said.

Walsh said he expects Avatech's government business to grow at the state and federal levels, as the newly authorized Department of Homeland Security gets rolling nationwide.

Avatech is a top-ranked AutoDesk partner, said Chuck Bierworth, senior manager of sales for the government, education and major channel partners division of AutoDesk, San Rafael, Calif.

Bierworth admitted that he and other AutoDesk executives at first "weren't sure what to make of the merger, but it became clear after a while that a lot of our larger clients were looking for a different type of support from the AutoDesk reseller channel" than was previously available.

The resources attained in the PlanetCAD merger could help provide that support, Bierworth said. AutoDesk customers want channel partners with a presence across multiple geographic regions that can deliver services with consistency, regardless of the customer's location, he said.

"Avatech has filled an important void we had in our channel," he said.

The addition of PlanetCAD gives Avatech a customer base of more than 20,000 and 175 employees.