[5] In 1987, Adapco invested in and began to collaborate with Computational Dynamics, a startup company formed by members of a CFD research group at Imperial College London.

[1] Professional Engineering Magazine described this as "recession-proof performance" and went on to point out that this success is especially noteworthy considering that many of the company's customers are in the automotive industry, a sector of the economy that was, at the time, suffering record low sales levels.

This substantially reduces the need for expensive desktop computers—a requirement of some other similar packages[11] Even in periods of major economic downturn, few customers cut back on annual licenses.

[1] STAR-CAD is a range of product lifecycle management-embedded tools that allows engineers to perform computational fluid dynamics analysis from within their company's chosen computer-aided design environment.

[12] In a partnership with the United States Department of Energy, CD-adapco developed an expert system to model and analyze solid oxide fuel cells[13] The first release of STAR-CCM+ included the world's first commercially available polyhedral meshing algorithm.