Intergraph
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Intergraph is a global software company with more than 3000 employees worldwide (2007). Intergraph has industrial, government and military customers in more than 60 countries.
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[edit] History
Intergraph was founded in 1969 as M&S Computing, Inc., by ex-IBM engineers who had been working on the Saturn rocket for the Apollo program. M&S Computing assisted NASA and the U.S. Army in developing systems that would apply digital computing to real-time missile guidance.
From this initial work, M&S Computing was among the pioneers in the development of interactive computer graphics systems, which allowed engineers to display and interact with drawings and associated alphanumeric information. The first system sold was a mapping system for Nashville/Davidson County local government.
In 1980, M&S Computing changed its name to Intergraph Corporation, reflecting its involvement in interactive graphics. The first interactive CAD system, Intergraph Graphics Design System (IGDS) quickly became an industry benchmark, and the basis for the MicroStation file format, the PC-based CAD product owned by Bentley Systems, of which Intergraph was a part-owner.
The corporation became publicly owned in 1981, trading on the NASDAQ market under the symbol INGR. Intergraph began producing its own computer hardware based initially on VAX-based hardware and ultimately using its own Clipper chip (acquired from Fairchild Semiconductor) for a line of workstations that ran CLIX, their version of UNIX. This was the basis for a powerful and successful hardware business that eventually became a springboard for Intel and Windows NT-based workstations. Intergraph expanded its product line to other software areas such as electronics and printed circuit board design, electronic publishing, mapping & GIS, technical information management, dispatch management (E-911), architecture and building design, plant design, and image processing and photogrammetry systems.
In 1990 Intergraph exited the hardware business and became purely a software company.
On November 29, 2006, Intergraph was acquired by an investor group led by Hellman & Friedman LLC and Texas Pacific Group, making the company privately held.
[edit] Organization
At present (2007), Intergraph consists of 2 divisions:
- Security, Government & Infrastructure (SG&I)
- Process, Power & Marine (PP&M)
SG&I is the largest division with roughly twice the revenue of PP&M.
Its SG&I division has been known to support open file formats, illustrated by Intergraph's membership in the Open Geospatial Consortium.
[edit] See also
- Machine_translation
- Intergraph
- SYSTRAN
- WebSphere
- Weidner
