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Design Power, Inc.
Design Power is a Silicon Valley technology company offering Design++®, a knowledge-based engineering platform that significantly simplifies the capture of in-house engineering expertise and streamlines integration of legacy systems into design automation and product configuration solutions.
Design++ has an over 20-year history of supporting high-value design automation and product configuration applications at companies such as Baker Hughes, Bühler AG, Cornerstone Building Brands, and Fluor Corporation. Design++ is also the foundation for a commercial end-user application product for conceptual plant design: Bentley PlantWise.
Design Power is a Bentley Systems partner and provides support to existing Bentley Design++ and PlantWise users.
History (a short version)
Design++ started as a knowledge-based engineering R&D project with Nokia in Finland in mid-1980's. The initial goal was to apply expert system technology to Tampella's recovery boiler design. Scema Oy spun out of Nokia in 1988 to apply model-based reasoning to complex design problems.
In 1990 the company was relocated to San Francisco Bay Area and renamed to Design Power, Inc. The focus was on design automation solutions for large design problems. Some of the world-class satisfied customers included Fluor Corporation, General Electric (now Baker Hughes), Halliburton KBR, Bayer, Cisco Systems, Emerson Motors (now Nidec Motor Corporation), and Robertson-Ceco (now Cornerstone Building Brands).
Bentley Systems acquired Design Power in 2007 with a plan to develop new Design++ based end user applications, like PlantWise. In 2011 Bentley decided that Design++ would be better served in an independent company, thus Design Power was relaunched.
Mission Statement
"To bring to a larger audience the power of knowledge-based engineering through Design++®, which lets users capture their engineering and design knowledge for automatic re-use, thus making the computer an active part of the design process rather than a passive tool."