SOFTEK celebrates 30th anniversary

SOFTEK Services, Ltd. of Vancouver has been providing structural engineering software solutions since 1981. As the founder and president of SOFTEK, Mr. George Casoli, P.Eng., likes to say: “It was a time when mice had four legs, telephones had a dial, the web was a home for spiders, and windows were glass inserts in buildings.”

A lot has changed since then and SOFTEK is evolving as well. Late last year Mr. Casoli announced the appointment of Dr. Marinos Stylianou as the Chief Executive Officer to lead SOFTEK to the next level of customer service and product innovation. Dr. Stylianou brought with him extensive knowledge in the field of finite element analysis and many years of experience in global leadership roles at some of the world’s largest engineering simulation companies. Their relationship goes back to the early ’90s when Dr. Stylianou led the development of the S-FRAME solver.

To mark its 30th anniversary, SOFTEK will be releasing S-FRAME Structural Office R10 (S-FRAME®, S-STEEL®, S-CONCRETE® and B-LINE) early in the second quarter of 2011. R10 is a major new release with a host of new features and enhancements that expand Structural Office’s capabilities in many areas:

• New steel building codes including: AISC 360-5, CSA-S16-2001, CSA-S16-2009, EC3 2005 UK Annex.
• New and enhanced concrete design including: support for CSA-A23.3-04 Update #3, automated load calculations (minimum moments, enhanced seismic shear magnification), improved axial load and moment interaction diagrams, computation of the cracking moment, etc.
• Enhanced support for today’s trend for engineering practice towards more advanced forms of dynamic analysis, especially for seismic loading, the trend towards building and managing larger and more complex models.
• R10 also leverages the potential of new 64-bit operating systems and multi-core processors to further improve our customers’ productivity with a new 64-bit version of the analysis engine and new parallel processing (multi-thread) capability.
• Improved support for BIM (Building Information Modeling) with an enhanced bi-directional Autodesk Revit Structures interface and an updated link for TEKLA Structures.

Dr. Stylianou is optimistic about the future and promises exciting new products that will, once again, lead the structural engineering software industry in new and innovative ways.