MARLBOROUGH, MAThis year, Flomerics (www.flomerics.com) celebrates its 20th anniversary as an independent company. According to the company's founder, Dr. David Tatchell, this landmark is a testimony to the company's high-integrity, people-oriented culture and its core concept of delivering engineering simulation software for use by designers and engineers rather than just full-time analysts and specialists. Flomerics has reached an age that puts it among the oldest companies involved in computer-aided engineering (CAE). At the same time, it just completed a fiscal year during which it achieved a new high in revenue and saw its worldwide customer base grow to more than 2500 sites and 7000 individuals.
David Tatchell and Harvey Rosten worked together in the 1970s to pioneer the commercial availability of computational- fluid-dynamics (CFD) technologies. As electronic devices grew more powerful, it became increasingly important to know a system's precise cooling requirements at the design phase. Taking advantage of this opportunity, Tatchell and Rosten founded Flomerics in 1988. Their goal was to develop CFD software that simulated thermal exchange at the pre-prototyping phase of product development.
Tatchell served as chief executive officer until his retirement in 2006. Rosten led the development effort for the company's first products, but died of a brain tumor in 1997. The company's first product, Flotherm, was launched in September 1989 for use in thermal design for electronic systems. In 1995, Flomerics went public with a listing on the London Stock Exchange Alternative Investment Market.