About Us

Who We Are

Software Engineering Thought Leaders for the 21st century

Semantic Designs is the global leader for tools and services to enhance the development and modernization of complex software systems. We do this using a unique perspective and technology for how software can be analyzed and processed, developed over 50 years of building software, and applied over the last 30 years.

What We Do

Bring Automation to Difficult Software Engineering Tasks

Most software is constructed and modified manually. Manual changes are made only at small scale, and achieve a slow rate of change. We provide a unique engine, the DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit®, which is configured to handle repeated tasks, on a mixture of computer languages, and let DMS implement these tasks reliably across large code bases, economically and far faster than manual methods.

Why It Is Important

Enable Organizations to Better Utilize their Software

Many large software systems crucial to organization's operations were built slowly over long periods, losing knowledge of the structure along the way. Being able to analyze software at scale allows organizatinos to better understand the existing software, making planning easier and making manual changes more reliably and quickly. Being able to make massive changes, allows organizations to both modernize and optimize it, reducing cycle time for enhancement and enabling better intergration with other parts of the organization.

World-Class Tools to Understand and Enhance Large, Complex Systems

Since 1995, Semantic Designs, Inc., a privately- held corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas, has provided world-class analysis, enhancement and transformation of large and complex software systems to Enterprises, Integrators and Government organizations. Solutions also include Tools, Bundles and Suites, Services for Enterprises and ISVs, and System Integrator partnering for dozens of languages, databases and schema. All of SD's activities are enabled by highly automated tools based on SD's core technology, the DMS® Software Reengineering Toolkit™, an extremely generalized software analysis and mass code change engine.

SD's Commercially available products increase quality and productivity through formatting, test coverage, execution profiling, metrics, and source browsing. Obfuscation solutions for over 20 languages increase the security of intellectual property by scrambling source files while allowing applications to run normally. Services enable code remediation and enhancements for Enterprise-class businesses and cost-effective system development for ISVs. Partnering with select System Integrators helps deliver exceptional results for large and/or legacy systems.

Typical deployment environments are: Organizations with complex, in-house software systems, Web Site operations, Electronic Design Automation, Applications Security/Testing/QA and Legacy Migrations. Customers include Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon, Rockwell Collins, U.S. Navy, US Social Security Administration, ANZ Bank, IBM/Tivoli, Nomura Securities, Dow Chemical, ARM, Synplicity, and others. Partners include HP, Oracle and Microsoft.

Become part of the SD Community and see why "The Truth is in the Details."

The Engine that Can: DMS® Difference

Semantic Designs offers the industry's most comprehensive and flexible code transformation technology with DMS® . DMS's configurable analysis and transformation rules enables us to not only convert legacy software using older legacy technologies to modern targets, but also realize major code refactoring tasks to improve the quality and maintainability of the results.

DMS is unique in that a single tool platform supports over 40 programming langauges across mainframe, embedded and distributed platforms. SD remains committed to providing automated solutions that advance the state of the art for improving application system structure, security and quality, while lowering maintenance costs through modernization. Semantic Designs has successfully delivered solutions for more than 20 years without a single project failure!

Semantic Designs' History

In October 1995, founders Dr. Ira Baxter and Dr. Christopher Pidgeon established Semantic Designs as a privately held Texas corporation after winning a grant of $1.9 M from the Advanced Technology Program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to conduct research on the Design Maintenance System (DMS) vision. Funded research completed in 1999, and DMS has become a proven foundation to automate the deep analysis, enhancement and transformation of numerous large and complex software systems.

Semantic Designs has also leveraged the scope of DMS to rapidly build derivative commercial and custom tools as well as services and deploying them worldwide. The company remains committed to providing automated solutions for large-scale, complex software systems and advancing the state of the art for improving application system security and quality, while lowering maintenance costs.

Recently, InfoTech Research Group did an independent vendor assessment:
    Vendor Landscape Report for Legacy Modernization services
(published with permission). We are naturally pleased to be top-ranked in terms of Overall Product, Usability, Viability, and Reach (slide 7), as well as Features (slide 20).

Semantic Designs' People

Ira D. Baxter, Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Ira Baxter co-founded of Semantic Designs as Chief Technical Officer. He took the role of CEO in 2003 after the loss of his co-founder, Dr. Christopher Pidgeon. Ira has over 35 years of hardware and software development, management and consulting experience, including Schlumberger, Microelectronics Computing Consortium (MCC) Rockwell Automation and Software Dynamics. He holds two patents and has chaired sections for several Software Engineering and Development Conferences. Ira received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Irvine in 1990.

Dr. Michael Mehlich, Principal Engineer

Dr. Michael Mehlich joined Semantic Designs in 1996. As Principal Engineer, he has significantly contributed to creating and enhancing the company's core technology, the Design Maintenance System, or DMS. Michael is accomplished in numerous commercial applications for DMS and is responsible for system robustness as well as numerous function and language additions Author of numerous Software Engineering papers, Dr. Mehlich received his Dr. Rer. Nat. in Computer Science in 1995 from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.

Contact

info@semdesigns.com

Company Address

Semantic Designs, Inc.
13171 Pond Springs Road
Austin, Texas 78729-7102
Voice: 1-800-367-0482
Direct: 1-512-250-1018
Fax: 1-512-250-1191
Map

Associated Websites

Semantic Designs main website is www.semanticdesigns.com, with legacy alias www.semdesigns.com.
Other associated websites can be found here.

For more information: info@semanticdesigns.com    Follow us at Twitter: @SemanticDesigns

Corporate
Background