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Susan Smith
Susan Smith has worked as an editor and writer in the technology industry for over 16 years. As an editor she has been responsible for the launch of a number of technology trade publications, both in print and online. Currently, Susan is the Editor of GISCafe and AECCafe, as well as those sites’ … More » OnShape Revolutionizes CADAugust 24th, 2018 by Susan Smith
In an interview with former CEO of SolidWorks, John McEleny, co-founder of the new company OnShape, we discussed the new paradigm shift in the CAD industry that OnShape represents.
While OnShape is relatively new, those who founded the company have been in the industry for a long time. McEleny was a very early employee along with SolidWorks founder Jon Hirschtick, who is founder of OnShape. McEleny held several different positions including CEO before he left to start OnShape with Hirschtick. One of the advantages of being in the industry for awhile is that the former SolidWorks founders have seen many platform shifts, “from client servers to Windows to now cloud web mobile,” said McEleny. ‘When that happens, you have new entrants because people rethink the problem, the offering and the business model.” McEleny, along with others, worked for the early CAD pioneer Computervision before moving to the upstart SolidWorks and now OnShape. Cloud web mobile changed how to interact and changed the paradigm with users. “I point to those platform shifts because it’s exactly when you have a platform shift that it creates the opportunity both to rethink services and products we offer and how we deliver them and the business models which we give customers.” “When we started SolidWorks, we would ask what would Microsoft do. When we started OnShape it was more like what would Google do and why is that important? It turns out that now the infrastructure could now handle web GL could now handle a cloud-based offering with something called Google Body. Google Body was a 3D application written by Google of the human body, it has the skeletal, muscular system, etc. It was the first time you didn’t have to install software. Through a web browser you can interact with a 3D model and have a real time 3D experience, and really feel like it’s a desktop application. And why that’s so powerful is because that was a key enabler to allow us to say, the way in which CAD is being done can be changed.” Up until the present, every CAD system that has been out there, the atomic unit has been a file-based system. The CAD system installed system is where you have worked with the file, and when finished, you share the file around. There was no other way to do it until the Cloud. The cloud allows you to do CAD but it created a lot of problems. “With a digital CAD file, you never really know if it’s your most recent version,” said McEleny. “Think of your own personal interactions you’re working with editor on a story. You sent a story, call it Susan.doc, and then he starts editing, Susan1.doc, your changes emerges with Susan.doc or vice versa. Now add in many people across globe, and software incompatibility like someone using Creo or SolidWorks, then add in that it may be metadata, graphics data or materials data. They might have incompatible versions even within the same brand of software. And those problems get magnified when files and things are moving around. By interacting with a model and having a CAD system in the cloud and data in the cloud then you provide access. With that access you never shift the files, you don’t have to worry about which versions people are working on. You get out of the whole installations and upgrades of the data problems, you simply provide access. When you provide that access, you can provide a much more granular level security access control. By saying this person can edit, this person can comment and review, and it allows you to access data just like other data in the infrastructure system such as HR, finance, ERP. You’d never build your HR or ERP system based on files. And yet, the product infrastructure system has been a file-based system, and we feel like that needed to be changed.” OnShape was designed to solve many of those problems. It allows access via any kind of browser platform; mobile device and you don’t need to worry about versions. The lingua franca of how you interact with the system, the modeling paradigm, those things are similar just like they are with Creo, because that’s how engineers expect to interact, said McEleny. “They expect 3D feature-based modeling to be a way to articulate a design, so that part is familiar but the rest of it isn’t.” People don’t change software easily, and when they do, they do it when they start new projects. There are customers who want to unlock their engineering data from their current system, so others can have access to it. There are other customers who work alongside their current system and may have 50 seats of SolidWorks. They may begin a new project and will see how the new capabilities offered in OnShape are working for them. Eliminating the legacy of a platform makes OnShape appealing to mobile and peripheral users. It changes the playing field. OnShape Enterprise was launched in May this year. McEleny said that any company that uses EPM, ENOVIA or WINDCHILL SolidWorks products is using an individual productivity solution. When teams need to work together, they would need product data management (PDM) systems. “These were systems that showed who had access to what file when,” McEleny said. “Now with OnShape, you’re not moving files around and trying to control versions, there is only one version of the truth. Very similar to Google Docs. It’s a different and far more safe and efficient way of working because you don’t have files, it’s a database, there is no save button in OnShape. You can’t save because everything is a transaction and everything you do is saved. So, you never have to worry about losing work if your CAD system crashes. The crashes happen because there are many single points of failure on installed software. Whereas with the cloud-based system, the way we built it, there’s a tremendous amount of redundancy in the cloud so you don’t have single points of failure, so the system is far more reliable. Everything is a database and you will literally never lose work. And that’s a very powerful concept. The data management and collaboration of the process is built in to the product, so it changes how people work in terms of interacting with the system.” Tags: AEC, architects, architecture, Autodesk, building design, building information modeling, CAD, collaboration, design, SolidWorks Categories: 2D, 3D, AEC, architecture, Autodesk, BIM, collaboration, construction, engineering, field, field solutions, file sharing, infrastructure, OnShape |
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