Terms of service

Operational Usage Terms

Cadmould Cloud Services (Early Access)

These Operational Usage Terms (these “Usage Terms”) are issued by SIMCON kunststofftechnische Software GmbH, Schumanstr. 18a, 52146 Würselen, Germany (“SIMCON”).

They govern the operational use of the Cloud Services (as defined below) by each company that participates in SIMCON’s Early Access Partner Program under an early-access partner agreement concluded with SIMCON by which that company is granted an Early Access License to the AI Solver or to a SIMCON product that uses the Cloud Services (that agreement, the “Agreement”; that company, the “Partner”). These Usage Terms add operational detail to the Agreement and do not modify it. The Agreement takes precedence.

Effective date for a Partner: the date on which these Usage Terms are first made available to the Partner together with the invitation to access the Cloud Services.

1. Definitions, scope and precedence

1.1 Definitions. Capitalised terms not defined here (including “AI Solver”, “Partner Data” and “Early Access License”) have the meaning given in the Agreement. In addition:

• “Cloud Services” means the cloud-based simulation and related services that SIMCON makes available to the Partner in hosted form, in whatever form of delivery SIMCON determines under the Agreement, including a web application or portal, a hosted application programming interface (API), and the cloud-hosted execution of simulation requests routed from a software development kit (SDK) or other SIMCON software to SIMCON’s infrastructure.
• “Authorised Users” means the individuals or systems the Partner permits to access the Cloud Services under the Partner’s accounts or access means.

The Cloud Services comprise the AI Solver in hosted form and any further solvers and services that SIMCON makes available through the same environment, such as the cloud-hosted execution of SIMCON’s classical Cadmould simulation solver. Where the Agreement grants the Early Access License to a SIMCON product that uses the Cloud Services, such as a product combining the AI Solver with further solvers, interfaces or applications, references in these Usage Terms to the AI Solver include that product to the extent it is delivered through the Cloud Services. The Cloud Services are currently marketed as “Cadmould Cloud Services”; the commercial name and branding may vary or change without affecting these Usage Terms.

1.2 Scope. These Usage Terms govern the Partner’s operational use of the Cloud Services, whether used interactively or by automated means, and apply uniformly to all solvers and services provided through the Cloud Services. Further services, features and access methods that SIMCON makes available and that connect to, exchange data with, or make functionality of the SIMCON cloud available are likewise governed by the Agreement and these Usage Terms, unless SIMCON specifies separate terms for a particular service.

1.3 Precedence. If these Usage Terms conflict with the Agreement, the Agreement prevails. These Usage Terms govern the operational and acceptable-use matters they expressly address and apply where the Agreement is silent. Other than the limited right expressly granted in Section 2.3, they do not create, modify or waive any warranty, liability, indemnity, intellectual-property, data-usage or confidentiality term, all of which remain as set out in the Agreement.

2. Early-access basis of the Cloud Services

2.1 The Cloud Services comprise, first, the AI Solver in hosted form, a form of delivery that the Agreement already contemplates and that SIMCON determines in its reasonable discretion under the Agreement, and, second, further cloud-based services and solvers that SIMCON makes available through the same environment as related cloud-based services within the meaning of the Agreement. These Usage Terms specify that delivery operationally; they are not a new or separate commercial arrangement and grant no licence beyond the Early Access License granted under the Agreement and the limited right granted in Section 2.3.

2.2 SIMCON provides the Cloud Services on this basis pragmatically, in the interest of speed and the ability to iterate quickly during Early Access. The Partner’s access under these Usage Terms, to the Cloud Services as a whole including all solvers and services provided through them, ends when the Early Access License ends in accordance with the Agreement (including upon termination of the Agreement or upon general commercial availability of the AI Solver). Any use of a commercial release version or of hosted services thereafter is subject to a separate agreement, as the Agreement contemplates.

2.3 To the extent the Cloud Services include solvers or services that are not the AI Solver and are not already covered by the Early Access License under the Agreement (for example the cloud-hosted classical Cadmould solver where the Agreement licenses the AI Solver alone), SIMCON grants the Partner, for the term of the Early Access License and at no charge beyond the Partner Fee, a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, revocable right to use those solvers and services through the Cloud Services for the Partner’s own internal evaluation, testing and operational use within its own organisation, on the same conditions and subject to the same restrictions as apply to the AI Solver under the Agreement, applied mutatis mutandis (see Section 6.4). This right is granted by SIMCON unilaterally, imposes no obligation on the Partner beyond those conditions and restrictions, creates no entitlement to the provision or continued provision of any particular solver or service, and ends automatically when the Early Access License ends. Where the Early Access License under the Agreement already covers a solver or service provided through the Cloud Services, that licence alone governs its use and this Section 2.3 does not apply to it.

3. Fees

3.1 The consideration for the Early Access License, including access to the Cloud Services in the form SIMCON makes available, is the Partner Fee set out in the Agreement. During the Early Access phase, SIMCON charges no separate or usage-based fee for the Partner’s use of the Cloud Services in addition to the Partner Fee.

3.2 This does not limit SIMCON’s rights under the Agreement to determine and change the form and mode of delivery of the AI Solver and the other components of the Cloud Services and to set and modify reasonable bounds on the volume of compute, number of simulation requests, concurrency, response time and other operational parameters available to the Partner. Where the Partner’s use causes disproportionate or unforeseen cost, SIMCON may apply the measures set out in Section 7 (for example queuing, throttling or limiting) rather than charging additional fees.

3.3 For the avoidance of doubt, nothing in these Usage Terms shall create any entitlement of the Partner to any specific form of delivery, to any specific volume of compute, or to continued provision of the Cloud Services beyond the term of the Early Access License under the Agreement. All Partner Fees as set out in the Agreement remain payable irrespective of the Partner’s actual use or availability of the Cloud Services, subject only to the terms of the Agreement.

4. Early-access status

4.1 As acknowledged in the Agreement, the AI Solver and the Cloud Services, including the hosted delivery of the further solvers and services provided through them, are under active development and are made available as an early-access pre-release version for early testing, evaluation and operational use; they are not a final release product, need not be feature-complete, and may change. This Section restates that status for operational clarity and does not create, modify or waive any warranty, which remains as set out in the Agreement.

5. Accounts and access security

5.1 The Partner and its Authorised Users access the Cloud Services only through accounts and access means issued by or registered with SIMCON. These Usage Terms apply regardless of the authentication mechanism used.

5.2 All activity occurring under the Partner’s accounts or access means is deemed the Partner’s activity, including the activity of its automated systems and integrations.

5.3 The Partner shall not share its accounts or its access to the Cloud Services, and shall not permit any person other than its Authorised Users to access it under the Partner’s accounts or access means. The Partner shall not sell, transfer or otherwise make its accounts or access available to any third party. Where the authentication mechanism in use involves credentials that the Partner or its Authorised Users hold or control (for example passwords, access tokens, API keys or service-account secrets), the Partner shall keep them confidential, restrict them to its Authorised Users, and apply appropriate credential-handling measures, such as rotation, to the extent applicable to that mechanism; no such duty arises to the extent SIMCON operates the authentication itself and the Partner holds no reusable secret, for example where access uses one-time passcodes. The Partner shall notify SIMCON without undue delay of any suspected account sharing, compromise or unauthorised access.

6. Acceptable use

6.1 The Partner shall access the Cloud Services only through the interfaces documented by SIMCON.

6.2 The Partner shall not circumvent, disable or interfere with rate limits, metering, attribution or access controls, including by fanning out accounts or access means.

6.3 Where the Partner accesses the Cloud Services by automated means, the Partner shall respect rate-limit and back-pressure signals, implement reasonable back-off and retry behaviour, and avoid retry storms, runaway loops and uncontrolled parallel execution.

6.4 The restrictions in the Agreement continue to apply to use of the Cloud Services, including the restrictions on reverse engineering, on using the AI Solver or its inputs or outputs to develop, train, fine-tune or distil a competing simulation engine or model (no distillation), and on offering or making the AI Solver or simulation results available to third parties as a hosted or remotely accessible service (no distribution as a service). These restrictions apply mutatis mutandis to every solver and service provided through the Cloud Services, including the cloud-hosted classical Cadmould solver. Accordingly, the Partner shall not reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to derive the source code, model weights, architecture or underlying algorithms of any solver or service provided through the Cloud Services; shall not use any such solver or service, or any inputs to or outputs of it, to develop, train, fine-tune or distil a competing simulation engine, machine-learning model or surrogate model; and shall not offer or make any such solver or service, or simulation results derived from it, available to any third party as a hosted or remotely accessible service. Use of the Cloud Services is permitted only within the Partner’s own organisation and for the Partner’s own internal purposes. Mandatory statutory rights that cannot be contractually excluded (including under Section 3(2) of the German Trade Secrets Act (GeschGehG) and Sections 69d, 69e of the German Copyright Act (UrhG)) remain unaffected.

7. Fair use, service protection and suspension

7.1 The Cloud Services are a shared, capacity-constrained early-access environment. The Partner shall use them fairly and shall not impair them or other users’ access, in particular by overloading them with requests or by submitting load profiles or excessively large or high-resolution jobs that consume a disproportionate amount of compute or storage.

7.2 To protect stability, security, capacity and fair access, SIMCON may at its reasonable discretion maintain, update, throttle, queue, prioritise, limit, suspend or restrict the Cloud Services or individual functions, in whole or in part. Reasons include planned or emergency maintenance, protection against misuse or attack, protection of compute and GPU capacity (which may cause jobs to be queued or declined), protection against disproportionate or unforeseen cost, a legal prohibition, the failure of an upstream provider, and the handling of faulty or unattended clients. Where the Agreement governs the cost or availability of the Partner’s access, the Agreement governs.

7.3 SIMCON will apply any limit or suspension reasonably, limit it to what is necessary, give the Partner notice where reasonably practicable, and restore access promptly once the cause is resolved. SIMCON shall exercise such rights in a commercially reasonable and proportionate manner and shall limit any restriction to what is necessary considering the underlying reason. SIMCON shall use commercially reasonable efforts to ensure that any such measures do not materially and sustainably deprive the Partner of the core functionality of the Cloud Services, except where required for legal, regulatory, or security reasons. Where a restriction materially impacts the Partner’s use, SIMCON shall, where reasonably practicable, offer reasonable mitigation measures or workarounds. In case of material restrictions exceeding a reasonable duration, the Parties shall discuss appropriate operational mitigation in good faith.

7.4 During early access SIMCON uses commercially reasonable efforts toward good availability but gives no service-level commitment and no availability guarantee.

8. Monitoring and usage data

8.1 SIMCON may monitor the operation and use of the Cloud Services and collect usage data, including function calls, request volume and concurrency, data volume, errors, latencies, usage patterns, and a record of which Authorised User triggered which operation. Usage data is technical and operational data and is not intended to include the content of the Partner’s simulation inputs. The web interfaces may use product-analytics and session-recording technologies; the services used, the categories of data, their hosting locations and the purposes are described in Annex A. To the extent such technologies incidentally capture the content of simulation inputs or results, SIMCON treats that content in accordance with the confidentiality provisions of the Agreement and does not use it beyond operating and securing the Cloud Services and as the Agreement permits. SIMCON shall implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to minimise any incidental capture of Partner data and shall delete such data without undue delay where not required for the stated purposes.

8.2 SIMCON processes usage data to operate and provide the Cloud Services, to meter use, to ensure security and prevent misuse, and to manage stability and capacity, and may use aggregated and anonymised usage data for operational metrics.

8.3 Where usage data contains personal data, for example email address, name, IP address or a device or licence identifier, SIMCON processes it only for authentication, licence enforcement and device activation, billing, and usage and session reconciliation, and not to build personal or behavioural profiles of individuals.

8.4 Processing of personal data is based on Article 6(1)(f) GDPR for legitimate interests related to service security, monitoring, and improvement.

9. Submitted data

9.1 SIMCON processes the simulation inputs the Partner submits through the Cloud Services (for example part geometries, meshes, material and process parameters) to perform the requested simulation and return the results to the Partner. Submitted inputs and the results returned are treated in accordance with the confidentiality provisions of the Agreement. This applies regardless of which solver or service provided through the Cloud Services processes the submission.

9.2 Simulation inputs and related technical data the Partner transfers to SIMCON through the Cloud Services are Partner Data within the meaning of the Agreement. SIMCON’s use of such data is governed by the data-provision, usage-rights, data-ownership, deletion and derived-IP provisions of the Agreement, including the licence granted there for the internal purposes stated there (such as benchmarking, validation and, unless the Partner has opted out, training) and the training opt-out. The Partner may exercise the training opt-out, for all or for specific datasets, at any time by written notice to SIMCON in the manner the Agreement provides; email suffices, and SIMCON confirms receipt without undue delay. The time at which an opt-out takes effect, including any confirmation of receipt the Agreement requires for that purpose, is determined by the Agreement; where the Agreement does not determine it, an opt-out takes effect for training uses commencing after its receipt by SIMCON. An opt-out does not affect uses that the Agreement permits to continue. No Data Submission Form or similar formality is required for data transferred through the Cloud Services.

9.3 The Partner shall not submit personal data, sensitive data, or data unrelated to the simulation purpose, and is responsible for the lawfulness of its uploads.

9.4 SIMCON applies no fixed deletion rule by default and does not guarantee indefinite retention. On the Partner’s request, SIMCON deletes the relevant submitted data in accordance with the deletion provisions of the Agreement (including the deadlines and exceptions stated there, such as routine backups and aggregated or anonymised operational metrics). The Partner is responsible for its own backups. For 60 days after the Partner’s access to the Cloud Services ends, the Partner may request retrieval of its submitted data in the form in which SIMCON holds it.

10. Availability, maintenance and changes

10.1 SIMCON may carry out planned and emergency maintenance, with notice where reasonably practicable. Availability is otherwise governed by Section 7.

10.2 Subject to the Agreement, SIMCON may modify, add, deprecate or discontinue functions, endpoints, solvers or models of the Cloud Services, including changing infrastructure or the form of delivery, on reasonable notice where practicable and to the extent reasonable for the Partner. The Partner is responsible, at its own cost, for adapting its integration and for building reasonable resilience against changes or unavailability. SIMCON shall provide reasonable prior notice of material changes where practicable. SIMCON shall not discontinue or materially degrade functionality that is core to the Partner’s use of the Cloud Services under the Early Access License without providing a functionally equivalent replacement or workaround, except where such change is required for legal, regulatory, or security reasons; this does not limit SIMCON’s rights under the Agreement to determine the form of delivery or the term of the Early Access License, and it creates no entitlement to any particular solver or service beyond the AI Solver (Section 2.3). Any changes shall be reasonable for the Partner, considering the nature of the Early Access phase and the Partner’s reliance on the Cloud Services.

11. Simulation results and material data

11.1 Simulation outputs are approximations provided for the Partner’s information and decision support. The Partner must independently verify and validate outputs before relying on them, and must not use them as the sole basis for tooling, part, production or business decisions, or for safety-critical applications, without independent verification. The warranty, accuracy-disclaimer and liability provisions of the Agreement govern; nothing in this Section creates any additional warranty or liability.

11.2 Where SIMCON makes material datasets available, the material information they contain is non-binding and is neither an agreed quality nor a warranty or guarantee as to the properties of the materials concerned, including for materials identified as comparable to another material (comparison materials). Results computed from comparison materials carry a wider confidence interval than results computed from original data. For accurate or consequential simulations, the Partner should use its own material data, verified with the responsible manufacturer.

12. Changes to these Usage Terms

12.1 SIMCON may make operational adjustments to these Usage Terms, for example to monitoring details or fair-use parameters, on reasonable prior notice, provided the adjustment is reasonable for the Partner and does not change the Partner’s substantive position under the Agreement. If an operational adjustment would unreasonably disadvantage the Partner and the Partner objects within a reasonable period, the Partner may discontinue use of the affected functionality, and the Partner’s rights under the Agreement are unaffected.

12.2 These Usage Terms provide no mechanism to modify the Agreement. Any change affecting the substantive terms of the Agreement requires the form the Agreement prescribes for amendments.

13. Acceptance and miscellaneous

13.1 These Usage Terms are provided to the Partner together with the invitation to access the Cloud Services. By creating an account for, or using, the Cloud Services following delivery of these Usage Terms, the Partner accepts them as the terms for that access during Early Access.

13.2 Where the Agreement provides that SIMCON makes the AI Solver and related cloud-based services, or a SIMCON product that uses the Cloud Services together with those services, available under operational terms issued by SIMCON, these Usage Terms are those operational terms (“Operational Terms”) within the meaning of the Agreement. The Cloud Services, currently marketed as Cadmould Cloud Services, are the AI Solver and related cloud-based services or, as the case may be, the cloud-based services used by that product within that meaning.

13.3 The governing law and dispute-resolution mechanism of the Agreement apply.

13.4 These Usage Terms confer no rights beyond those in the Agreement and the limited right granted in Section 2.3, and are to be read consistently with the Agreement.

13.5 Example code and similar materials that SIMCON publishes in addition to the Cloud Services, for example sample code, sample workflows or viewers made available through a public repository or other channel, are licensed solely under the licence terms published together with those materials. These Usage Terms grant no licence to such materials, and where they include third-party or open-source components, those components’ own licence terms apply.

Annex A

Services and Data

This Annex forms part of these Usage Terms. It describes the services SIMCON uses to operate the Cloud Services, the categories of data they process, their hosting locations and the purposes. It is referenced in Section 8.1 (monitoring and usage data). SIMCON updates this Annex under Section 12.1, and where a change involves the services used to operate the Cloud Services, under Section 10.2.

As SIMCON adds or changes the services it uses to operate the Cloud Services, any additional data processing, providers, hosting locations or transfer mechanisms are reflected here under the same procedure.

A.1 Provider and contacts

• Provider: SIMCON kunststofftechnische Software GmbH, Schumanstraße 18a, 52146 Würselen, Germany.
• Data Protection Officer: exkulpa GmbH, Waldfeuchter Str. 266, 52525 Heinsberg, Germany. Telephone: +49 (0) 2452 99 33 11. Email: datenschutz@simcon.com.

A.2 Categories of personal data

Personal data currently processed in operating the Cloud Services: email address, name, IP address, user identifier (user_id), and a device identifier/fingerprint used for licence activation. Authentication is currently person-based. Personal data is processed only for authentication, licence enforcement and device activation, billing, and usage and session reconciliation (Usage Terms Section 8.3), and not to build personal or behavioural profiles. The simulation data the Partner submits (geometries, meshes, material and process parameters, results) is not intended to contain personal data, and the Partner shall not submit personal, sensitive or simulation-unrelated data (Usage Terms Section 9.3).

A.3 Services and data map

The following table lists the services SIMCON uses to operate the Cloud Services.

Note: Data categories include both personal data (summarised in A.2) and the Partner’s confidential business data, e.g. simulation inputs and results; the latter is governed by the confidentiality provisions of the Agreement. Personal data is shown in bold.

A.4 Hosting changes and transfers

Hosting locations are stated per service in the table above; they are a description, not a binding commitment, and SIMCON may change them with notice under Sections 10.2 and 12.1. Where personal data is processed outside the European Union, an appropriate transfer safeguard applies (such as EU Standard Contractual Clauses or a Data Privacy Framework / adequacy mechanism), as recorded per service above.

A.5 Separation

The Cloud Services run on a shared environment in which separation between partners is implemented logically through access controls.

Annex B

Services of the self-service portal

This Annex lists the further services SIMCON uses to operate the self-service portal, where Partners sign in and manage their team and subscription. It is read together with Annex A and is updated in the same way.

B.1 Services and data map