28 years of building together.
An OEM partnership since 1998. The Rasterex SDK ships as part of DataViewer's on-prem product, so their customers get a multi-format engine without DataViewer ever owning that fight.
OEM, on-prem, and a partner that owns the formats.
DataViewer is an Australian-headquartered engineering document management vendor with users in 31 countries. Their product runs on-premises, inside the customer's own infrastructure. That constraint is non-negotiable for the buyers they serve.
Their customer base runs deep into defence, government and critical infrastructure. For these buyers, on-premises deployment is not a preference. It is a contractual and security requirement. The Rasterex SDK ships inside every DataViewer install, on-site at the customer, with no data leaving the customer's perimeter.
Four milestones, one partnership.
- 011998ActiveX integration
First integration with Rasterex, embedded into a Windows desktop product using ActiveX.
- 02Early 2000sWindows Server
Migration to a Windows Server-based deployment model, opening up multi-user access at customer sites.
- 032010sSDK
Adoption of the Rasterex SDK, deeper programmatic control of the viewer inside DataViewer's own product.
- 04TodayEmbedded engine
The Rasterex engine runs inside DataViewer, on-prem at every customer site. Same partnership, new generation of technology.
Three ways to solve it. Two of them break.
Anyone embedding a multi-format viewer into their own product faces the same fork in the road. Build it, glue it together, or partner with a vendor whose entire company is the engine.
Writing a CAD and PDF rendering stack from scratch is a multi-year R&D project. DWG, DGN, IFC and the long tail of engineering formats each carry decades of edge cases. Every new release of AutoCAD or Revit is another maintenance bill, forever.
Open-source libraries cover pieces of the problem. None of them cover all the formats their customers actually open, with the fidelity defence and engineering buyers expect. Integrating, hardening and supporting that patchwork on-prem in 31 countries is a permanent tax on the roadmap.
Pick a partner whose entire company is the multi-format engine, who can ship on-prem under your brand, and who fits your architecture instead of forcing you into theirs. That is the call DataViewer made in 1998, and they have not had to revisit it.
When your customers operate in defence, critical infrastructure and government across 31 countries, the question is never 'cloud or on-prem.' It is only ever on-prem. That means the SDK you embed has to install cleanly on the customer's own infrastructure — not call home, not require a cloud dependency, not create a security audit problem. Rasterex has operated this way since 1986. That is what DataViewer chose in 1998, and it is still the reason the partnership holds.
“We've followed Rasterex through every major technology shift over 28 years. The consistency and depth of the platform is what keeps us here.”
