TurboCAD

IMSI started its operations as a software publisher in 1983. Initially, IMSI published business productivity titles, including one computer graphics application, 4-Point Graphics. 4-Point was actually the first painting program available for the IBM PC. For the next seven years, IMSI continued down the publisher path, employing no software developers but narrowing its focus on applications to those in the Computer Graphics space. Many of these graphics applications were sold as a bundle with graphic input devices, such as mice, digitizing tablets, and hand-held and desktop scanners. As a matter of fact, the first product to bear the IMSI name was a computer mouse, first sold in 1985. IMSI started to sell CAD software in 1988, when it licensed and began private-labeling the program ProDesign under the name IMSI Designer. A year later, IMSI began reselling TurboCAD, a product developed in South Africa and sold in North America by a company called Milan Systems. Buoyed by its success in selling TurboCAD, both stand-alone and also bundled with its mice, IMSI acquired Milan Systems, and with it, the exclusive North American sales rights to TurboCAD. From there, IMSI purchased global sales rights and then finally the source code, thereby beginning, in 1990, its role as both a publisher and a software developer. In 1990, TurboCAD was still a DOS (Disk Operating System) product only, so the initial development challenge became to create a Windows version of the product. The first Windows version was created by a hired US-based developer. Because this first TurboCAD version was costly to develop in the US, IMSI decided to try to begin developing TurboCAD overseas. Fortunately for the company, because of Perestroika and the collapse of the Iron Curtain, there was a good supply of bright, mathematically-oriented software developers available for hire in Russia. In 1992 IMSI hired its first developers and began what is now nearly a 25 year old CAD development team in Russia. Successes in the sales of TurboCAD began in the early 1990s when IMSI began direct mail marketing offers to purchase the product. At the time, TurboCAD was 2D only and was priced at $99 to compete against products such as Generic CADD and Drafix. Specially-priced offers were mailed each month to prospects in the U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K., France, and Germany, and their success quickly grew the installed user base to several hundred thousand worldwide. This direct sales success also fueled a strong global interest from resellers to carry TurboCAD, quickly establishing itself as the 1 Retail CAD product in the world. In 1993, IMSI purchased the rights to the Macintosh CAD program, Pegasus, which it rebranded as TurboCAD for the Mac. This was a 3D wireframe product which retailed for $495. The Mac version of TurboCAD was IMSI’s first 3D CAD solution. Since TurboCAD gave IMSI a beachhead in the retail software channel, the company began a period of licensing and acquisition of other applications to feed into this channel. Acquired and licensed products included FloorPlan, Easy Language, VirusCure, WinDelete, OrgChart Pro, TurboProject, and MasterClips. In fact, MasterClips, by the mid-1990s, became the single biggest revenue-generating product line for IMSI. Coincident with this product expansion was an expansion of overseas offices and localized versions of its developed products to support these international locations. By 1998, IMSI had offices in Sydney, London, Ottawa, Paris, Stockholm, Munich, Johannesburg, Tokyo, and Rio de Janeiro. By the end of 1990s, the retail market for software had begun to soften and IMSI began a period of refocusing on direct sales, though this time with an emphasis on online sales and marketing. The cornerstone of these efforts was the establishment of the IMSIsoft.com (later IMSIDesign.com) and then the TurboCAD.com websites. These sites were integrated to IMSI's emailings to both its user base and to prospect email lists.