So, what happened? Read yesterday announcement made by GrabCAD here. GrabCAD is going to 3D by adding viewing capabilities to their website. Here are few passages from GrabCAD blog about new functionality.

Share your models with anyone in 3 dimensions? Check. Pin annotations right on the surface of a model to share advice and ideas with other engineers? Check. GrabCAD’s new in-browser 3D viewer is a huge step toward seamless collaboration and sharing for mechanical engineers and designers.

According to SolidSmack publication, GrabCAD developed their own viewer. I didn’t find a confirmation for that on GrabCAD website. Josh Mings of SolidSmack compared it with Web 3D:

Wow, when I said Web 3D was heating up, I wasn’t kidding. You know GrabCAD is always cooking up new features, but this is a delightful surprise. Today, they launch their own web-based 3D Viewer available right inside the GrabCAD interface to view 3D files and collaborate with others. Here’s the sneak peak.

Actually, I thought Web 3D was branded by Bernard Charles of DS as part of 3DVIA introduction. However, it won’t decrease the importance of 3D viewing for engineers and other people handling 3D models.

What is “in the box”?

In a nutshell, GrabCAD provides the ability to view and annotate CAD models you uploaded to GrabCAD website. Viewer supports STL files and runs in any WebGL enabled browser. GrabCAD automatically converts files to STL (15’000 files already converted according to GrabCAD). Here is what GrabCAD viewer supposed to do:

Collaborate with engineers on projects you’re working on by annotating pins right on the model
Share your models securely with clients, manufacturers, or anybody without CAD software
Check out all public models on GrabCAD without downloading them

Few limitations that may disappoint some users. IE explorer is not supported, for the moment. Automatic conversion of file STL can go wrong and you will be requested to make a manual STL file upload. Speed can be vary and depend on STL file size and connection speed.

From “Facebook” to 3D collaboration business

GrabCAD expansion from community website sharing CAD models to 3D collaboration confirms that company is searching how to provide more services to monetize website performance. Couple of weeks ago, Hardi Meybaum, GrabCAD CEO stated that collaboration service becomes one of the most important one – …the company now plans to launch what could become the focal point of its business: a service that aims to change the way engineers and their customers collaborate on designs….

In my view, GrabCAD is challenged by how to monetize the tremendous success in making 200K engineers to register on their website and upload 40K free CAD models. Funded by few institutional investors, GrabCAD has an access to money that allows them to experiment with different directions.

Competition

By stepping into 3D Collaboration, GrabCAD will face more competition. Nobody has a vision for Facebook for engineers. However, to collaborate and share models in 3D is less unique value proposition, in my view.Autodesk 360, SolidWorks n!Fuze, CADFaster, etc. This is a short list of public cloud-based collaboration tools. When you turn to “on premise” solutions, the number of tools will only increase. What will be GrabCAD differentiation among all these products? Usability? Price? Community? It is an interesting question to ask.

What is my conclusion? Viewer is a cool feature. By adding it, GrabCAD will “grab” people to spend more time on the website.However, pivoting is the name of the game. GrabCAD + 3D Viewer = Pivoting.The question of GrabCAD business model is still not answered, in my mind. If GrabCAD focus is on helping engineers in manufacturing companies to collaborate, GrabCAD will be clearly moving closer to PLM trajectory and compete with other cloud-based PLM offerings. Otherwise, Hardi Meybaum and his team have more surprises in the box to come later. Time will show…

Best, Oleg

Cloud-based storage — Dropbox, especially — has become the primary villain in the move toward BYOD (bring your own device) workplaces, but is also an area of strong growth for providers such as Box.net that can support business needs. With those concerns in mind, this acquisition makes a lot of sense for EMC… Already, BYOD is wreaking havoc on unprepared companies, including companies like IBM that should know better. Employees want to use their personal iPhones, iPads and Android phones that to work from anywhere, but employers worry that sensitive corporate documents stored in the cloud on service

BYOD trend influence

BOYD (Bring Your Own Device) trend has a clear influence to the story of business dropbox development. According to the latest research the amount of employees supporting BYOD ideas is growing:

According to a recent British Telecom report, known as "Rethink the Risk", 60 per cent of employees are already using their personal devices when they head to work, while 82 per cent of companies surveyed said they either currently sanction BYOD or plan to do so within the next two years. Almost half — or 46 per cent — of employees working in organizations that don’t support BYOD say they’d like to be able to hook up their own devices while they’re on the job.

What is my conclusion? I think the combination of BYOD and business dropbox can have a significant influence on some areas PLM today is focusing on. Supply chain, global design and manufacturing – all these implementations require efficient data-sharing capabilities. Secured PLM dropbox can do it. The competition is clear in place. Fun time… Just my thoughts.

Best, Oleg

Picture courtesy GIGAOM article.

Another interesting point is related to the fact Amazon is working to support product customization on the public cloud. It will remove another big barrier for deployment and implementation of enterprise software. Here is a very interesting passage:

The conventional wisdom is that big companies are wary of running ERP and other enterprise applications in a public cloud — because they tend to be quite customized and tied into other applications, which makes them difficult to forklift into the cloud. But Amazon is working to change that perception.

PLM and ERP: cloud race

In the past, CAD / PLM vendors lost the competition of C-level and IT visibility in the organization. PLM was considered as Engineering tools, and it took many years and significant effort to improve this perception (still not accomplish in full, from my standpoint). These days a typical “PLM on the cloud” discussion usually runs in too many questions about cloud PLM viability and security. At the same time, we can see how ERP vendors run their products on Amazon cloud.

PLM and Cloud / IaaS

When Amazon is considered as a definite leader in IaaS race, Aras PLM is thinking differently. During the ACE 2012 conference earlier this month, Aras announced Aras Spectrum – soon to be available on Microsoft Windows Azure platform. You can take a look on my post-ACE conference blog post – Aras PLM, Microsoft Azure and Cloud competition.

Autodesk (new PLM vendor these days) is playing with lots of “cloud toys” in the portfolio. One of the toys is PLM 360 -recently announced “cloud PLM alternative”. It is not clear what IaaS platform is using for their cloud development and deployment, for the moment.

What is my conclusion? Amazon is pushing to the enterprise by supporting major ERP vendors. Autodesk is playing with new cloud offering and probably going to make their IaaS choice later. Microsoft is experimenting with Aras PLM to provide Aras Innovator up and running on Azure Cloud. Dassault, Siemens, PTC… Are you watching?

Best, Oleg

I hope I’ve got your attention with this blog title. So far, GrabCAD was known, until now, as a company that focusing on creation of community of engineers and crowdsourcing in engineering. If you still thinking so, make a refresh – not any more. GrabCAD is focusing now on how to solve the problem of design collaboration. Navigate to Boston Business Journal article today -GrabCAD to launch a new service for engineers and hire exec team to read more about it. According to Hardi Meybaum, GrabCAD co-founder and CEO:

…the company now plans to launch what could become the focal point of its business: a service that aims to change the way engineers and their customers collaborate on designs… The latter will be necessary as GrabCAD looks to roll out its new collaboration service within months, he said. Currently, most collaborating between engineers and their customers is done by emailing designs back and forth and discussing them over the phone, Meybaum said. What GrabCAD has developed is a “more visual way to collaborate,” he said. The service, which began in beta last week, allows engineers to post 3D versions of their designs on a private section of GrabCAD. Customers can then view the design – rotating around it to see all sides – and put a pin in an area of the design where they’d like to leave a comment.

In addition to that GrabCAD is planning to hire three vice-presidents to expand existing executive team:The company also plans to soon hire three vice presidents for its executive team, in engineering, product and marketing, Meybaum said.

This is not a first time I’m posting about GrabCAD. If you want to refresh your memory, navigate to few of my previous posts – The Future of Engineering Communities and GrabCAD, Collaboration and DropBox. The second one (including video) can give you hints of “changing course” of GrabCAD towards solving problems of collaboration. The confirm it is not a mistake or last minute thoughts, navigate to the 2-years-old GrabCAD presentation on slideshare – CAD Future and GrabCAD. You can learn from there that GrabCAD vision already in 2010 was to provide a solution for collaboration.

GrabCAD business model

When you speak about online community, the question of the business model is usually raises many questions. How to monetize thousands of engineers using GrabCAD to upload/download CADmodels? Meybaum answered on this question in the BizJournal article:

GrabCAD has been earning some revenue from corporate design challenges that launched on the site last fall; past examples have included a deck vent for luxury yachts builder Saare Yachts and an interior for a Shelby car. But the new service is expected to become the main revenue source for the company after it launches, Meybaum said.

Design Collaboration and PLM

Collaboration is not a new problem. Thinking about buzzwords, to solve a problem of design collaboration is one of the fundamental objectives of any CAD/PLM vendors. Solutions like Dassault 3DLive and others were focused how to get it done in a most efficient way. It was on the list of PDM/PLM for the last 10-15 years. Does it mean GrabCAD is about to compete with mainstream collaborative design solutions coming from Dassault, Siemens PLM, PTC and other vendors? I’m not sure yet… GrabCAD will be trying to monetize a significant amount of engineers (about 187,000 according to the publication) with a new service.

Design Collaboration and Email problem

Many companies these days are run by email. Email is the problem and the solution at the same time. Many of design collaboration, PDM and PLM solutions today on the market are trying to solve a problem of the mess email can create in the company. Just to point to few “newcomers” – Kenesto and Vuuch. According to Kenesto website, the solution provided by Kenesto is “nothing to instal, as easy to use as email, but better”. According to the problem definition on Vuuchwebsite – swamped by email? No matter the deliverable or the people involved, tracking details, staying on schedule and keeping everyone up to date, is an age-old problem that is getting worse due to the proliferation of email and distributed teams. Nuage is introducing something they call – Social Business Collaboration – Generation Y, today’s workforce entrants, are dependent on social media to communicate [I assume social media communication is opposite to email].

GrabCAD is targeting to solve the problem of email communication too. Take a look on the following passage from BizJournal article -Currently, most collaborating between engineers and their customers is done by emailing designs back and forth and discussing them over the phone, Meybaum said.

What is my conclusion? As you know, all roads lead to Rome. Can I say today all roads in engineering lead to PLM? Maybe… It still too early to say what type of collaboration service GrabCAD will provide. Taking into account few known snippets of data such as – 3D Viewer, collaborative design, to avoid an email problem, I can expect GrabCAD to provide cloud applications helping people to “work together”. Take a look on one of my previous posts – How to reinvent PLM collaboration? to grab some ideas about what other companies are doing today. Will GrabCAD grab something different? Time will show. I just want to restate my yesterday note about PLM collaboration – PLM is a fun place to be again. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Social creates a lot of buzzes nowadays. Believe it or not, butmore than 72% of people in U.S. are now on Facebook. It is impossible to ignore, and I can see companies that trying to apply the idea of social networking to other places. PLM is one of them. Vuuch was one of the companies that pioneered the ideas of “social @ work”. Nuage is another one that came just recently by introducing Nuage Cafe social app as a first step towards fully blown PLM.

I’m not sure if “social” magic will make PLM idea more prominent. I think the devil in details. Working for enterprise and corporate clients is a different story. It is much different than Facebook. One of the companies that doing a great job by selling “social story” to enterprises is Yammer. I was reading BrainYard blog earlier this week called -Yammer Updates Emphasizes Enterprise, Cloud Search. What was interesting in this story is a connection made between Yammer social functionality and other on premise and cloud applications in the company. Yammer propose something they call “universal search”.

…Yammer’s concept is different. To Yammer, universal search makes it possible to search across connections to both enterprise and cloud-based systems integrated with a Yammer network. For example, a search by customer name might turn up automated updates from Salesforce.com, SAP, and a Microsoft SharePoint site, as well as posts by users about that company.

The idea of search crossing cloud / premise boundaries is another interesting point.

All the data that gets pulled out of systems to populate the ticker or activity feed also gets indexed for universal search,” CEO David Sacks said in an interview. “It really addresses the problem of how to get universal search across cloud applications. Traditionally, enterprise search appliances just crawl all the data behind the firewall.”

I think, Yammer take is interesting because it confirms that manufacturing (and other enterprise organizations) cannot live in “social vacuum”. You can bring Facebook to the organization, but without connecting social network to the right data sources, you will be struggling with your ability to deliver real value. Search is a fundamental mechanism to bring disconnected pieces of data together. PLM companies are thinking a lot about how to make it work. Almost all PLM companies in the past made OEM agreement with enterprise search solution (Authonomy, Endeca, etc.). Dassault Systemes moved forward and acquired Exalead to make search work across DS products. Siemens PLM just released TeamCenter Active Workspaces – innovative applications that use a search as one of the paradigms to access data. Startup companies like Inforbix(*) are experimenting with different ways to aggregate content across disparate applications to make it easy available.

What is my conclusion? Social is not a magic that converts enterprise software and PLM to “gold” overnight. You need to think how to “embed” social into your company infrastructure, connect it to other solutions. This is the only way to make it work. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

*Disclosure – I’m co-founder of Inforbix.

Big. Bold. Boom! The one and the only SolidSmack is writing about PLM. Do you remember first SolidSmack mission statement? Unfortunately, I didn’t make a snapshot of that page. It was something like “to supply a daily portion of coolness to engineers and everybody around”. Here is what happens. SolidSmack is taking himself into wishy-washy conversation about PLM… Well, I actually do like it and add to my PLM definition stories.

Two blog posts caught my attention: PLM Software: The War Rages On and Survey: Is PLM Software Worth It? Both stories were written by Adam O’Hern. Two blogs are worth reading. Take it together with comments- I’m sure you will enjoy. Here are my favorite passages.

The case for PLM:

PLM is not any one piece of software, but rather a way of connecting various parts of an organization into a single cohesive system. It allows designers to more easily take manufacturing issues into consideration, and allows manufacturers to synchronize operations with marketing and distribution. It’s a way of linking design and engineering to marketing to manufacturing to retail and logistics; it’s a way of making big, complex problems more manageable.

Another quote is the elaboration on how much complexity (or structure) is enough?

The question is not whether Product Lifecycle Management is a good thing; clearly, it’s important that business processes be properly managed. But the structures we create for the management of our projects range in complexity from simple doodles on graph paper to massive corporate data structures, and everything in-between. Small businesses often struggle for lack of structure, while big corporations strangle themselves with excessive red tape. How do we find solutions that equip us for growth without inhibiting it?

What is my conclusion? Actually, I didn’t find any link on the survey. So, maybe it was a joke . I think PLM gets better these days. With the introduction of cloud, Autodesk PLM 360 and significant focus on improvement of user experience, we have a chance to see something better tomorrow. So, do you think PLM will punch your face with some fresh portion of ECO business process ? Hmm… I’m not sure it will happen soon. I even don’t know if it is needed. However, I’m sure PLM is looking for simple tools to get the job done. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Pictures courtesy of SolidSmack.com

NorthBridge seems to be shifts their focus to cloud computing. Navigate your browser to the following link to explore the Future of Cloud Computing. Don’t miss their twitter account - @futureofcloud. The article I was mentioned earlier speaks about of the survey NB made related to the cloud computing in 2011. Here are the most interesting passages I found there.

We found 40% of respondents are only experimenting with cloud computing at this point. Another 26% of survey respondents reported they are waiting for more maturity in the market before adopting a cloud strategy. In terms of current cloud use, 13% indicated complete confidence for mission critical applications, while 11 percent of respondents cited usage spikes. This shows that while cloud computing is indeed just getting started for a majority of the market, there is current production use of cloud computing that is significant…. The significance of saving money with cloud computing was reinforced by the fact that 55% of respondents believe the cloud has a lower total cost ownership (TCO) and only 13% indicating a higher TCO in the cloud.

What is my conclusion? Engineering, manufacturing and enterprises is a complex space characterized by slow speed of changes and sophisticated dependencies and eco-system. It is interesting to see how VC long time invested in companies in the enterprise domain shifts their interest to cloud computing. Actually, I can see it as a promising fact that can create an alternative to the kingdom of four big companies in this space. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Freebie. NorthBridge didn’t pay me to write about their cloud initiative.

Let’s talk nuts and bolts today. APIs.. If you think about any PDM / PLM implementation, the question about API is one of the most important. Why so? Because you know – it is near to impossible to get all done out of the box and via configuration. Even if marketing advertised and sales promised, you will have to have something to be done behind the scene using this magic word API.

PLM Openness

The topic of openness comes very often these days. I’ve been posting about openness about a year ago -PLM and New Openness. Notable news around PLM Openness is coming these days around so-called “Codex of PLM Openness” introduced by ProSTEP iViP. Navigate to the following link and you discover that majority of PLM vendors, including big-three-PLM (Dassault, PTC andSiemens PLM) are committed. Yesterday, during the opening session of annual Siemens PLM user conference – PLM World 2012 in Las Vegas, the topic of PLM Openness came into many conversations and even was captured by Siemens PLM blog.

Enterprise Systems and APIs

Enterprise systems have long history of API development. If you spent enough time in your life with databases and enterprise business you probably remember horrible stories of proprietary databases, move to SQL, hope of XML, believe in SOA / Web Services latest dreams about REST APIs. Last week, I came to a very interesting blog trilogy from CloudAve blog about enterprise architecture, APIs and more called – Simple Service Enterprise part 1, part 2, part 3. It is a bit long, but I recommend you to have a read. The following picture was resonating to my thoughts related to PLM implementations and APIs:

Here is my favorite passage that I’d apply to product lifecycle management and many other enterprise implementations:

…the fundamentals of information interchange: exposing business functionality, currently encapsulated in the back-end, to the outside world via services. These services are a one-to-one translation to back-end functions, which are one-to-one translations to business process steps themselves: the smallest level of business transaction.

Implementations, API and Open Data

Here is the idea how I see the future of open APIs. PLM system(s) is holding hostage of data and responsible for a set of process and transactions. Since PLM system cannot live in a vacuum, the interaction of PLM system with other systems in the enterprise (including various B2C and B2C services) is driven by processes. In order to have a productive API, you need to expose these processes using an appropriate level of granularity, including semantics of data (in this context, thinking about resources seems to me as an appropriate way). Having such a level semantically-resource-oriented-APIs can provide an easy and open way to interact with PLM system to build the most effective services.

What is my conclusion? To build a good API is a very complicated task. To make Open API is even harder. I can see a potential in exposing both semantics of data and related system functions in a way allowing me to use it and accomplish processes automatically. I think, web and REST give us a bit promise. The responsibility of vendors is to develop an appropriate level of granularity to make it usable. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Picture is courtesy of CloudAve.

Aras Spectrum

Last week, during ACE 2012, Aras presented a new cloud PLM strategy and new product – Aras Spectrum. So, what is behind this name? In a nutshell, Aras is partnering with Microsoft Azure team to deliver Aras Cloud PLM solution to mega-customers with high level of scalability and unique Aras cloud strategy. The main point Aras made is related to the reality of the PLM deployment requiring on-site integration between “multiple-clouds”. You can see this point presented on the following slide:

Aras introduces the three-way strategy to deploy Aras PLM on cloud with some mirroring functions on-premises. They called it 1/cloud mirror; 2/failsafe mirror; 3/dual deployment. You can see slides bellow. However, it is still hard to me to understand the difference between these options. What I understood from short conversation with Aras people, these options represent a different mirroring strategy.

Aras strategy is to leverage massive scale of Microsoft Azure platform to reach significant performance and scalability achievements. It includes the ability of Aras PLM to run across the world – wide network on Microsoft Azure data centers, 50,000+ users load test and more…

Which Cloud Better?

Aras is the first PLM vendors that introduce the question of “which cloud better?” to us. Until now, the main message we’ve heard from cloud providers was about how to eliminate the complexity of deployment and IT by using cloud PLM. That was the main message provided by Autodesk PLM 360 – instant on. The difference introduced by Aras is taking us to the reality of on-site customization, which unavoidable as was stated during Aras cloud presentation.

Another point of potential differentiation is cloud infrastructure. Aras is strategically positioned with Microsoft Azure. Autodesk didn’t provide any information so far about data centers and cloud infrastructure they provided. From a very brief public message provided by Autodesk publicly, PLM 360 is a true cloud application:

Autodesk PLM 360 is a true multi-tenant cloud application. Users and managers will never again have to worry about upgrades and broken customization; the application is always up-to-date and compatible with any customer-specific configuration.

Opposite to that, Aras Spectrum is by definition cloud/on-premises solution with some elements of mirroring. Aras is using additional services provided by 3rd party vendors to support so called “Aras Connected Cloud strategy:

What is my conclusion? Autodesk was a first major PLM broadly available on the cloud. However, cloud cannot be ignored these days. Aras Spectrum just confirmed that. Aras Spectrum is not released yet. I’ve heard Aras is talking about July-August 2012 timeframe (still need to be confirmed). However, it is interesting to see different views on how PLM cloud strategy can be implemented. I think, there are enough space to innovate with the cloud solutions, and I’m looking for more news.

Best, Oleg

I want to talk about CAD and the cloud or even more specific – CAD files and the cloud. Two leading companies in CAD space – Autodesk and Dassault Systems are presenting solutions allowing to store (or even synchronize) CAD files to the cloud. Dassault was probably pioneering this solution with SolidWorks n!Fuze. However, Autodesk clearly outperformed Dassault System by introducingAutodesk 360 providing 3GB of free storage for every AutoCAD user as well as other features – viewing, collaboration and sharing capabilities. Another Autodesk product – AutoCAD WS can store drawings directly to the cloud (I think both AutoCAD WS and Autodesk 360 paths need to converge somehow in the future).

The ability to store and sync CAD files using cloud services and storage is a powerful option. At the same time, the "Save As To Cloud" option is not much different from "Save As File". Everybody knows how messy file vaults look like in every company. Dou know how many CAD files are stored on local hard drives, USB discs, network storages in your company. The amount of un-managed files and data is growing. For the last 15-20 years, we didn’t succeed to create a reliable data-management option for all these files. There is a potential danger that all this "file mess" will be flowing to the cloud gates and will turn into CAD cloud mess. In my view, it creates an interesting opportunity to manage cloud-gates in more reliable ways to get data organized and prevent messy file uploads. It is a complicated problem, and it will require dedicated work of vendors to make it right. Do you remember Apple mobile.me failure? I can imagine similar situation happens with any CAD cloud synchronization features.

What is my conclusion? Cloud is a powerful technology. Engineers, architects and other CAD users are sensitive to information. The ability of cloud services to create a mess can put a potential of cloud services at risk. CAD vendors need to bring a solution that will allow to cloud CAD file storage to become manageable and reliable. Otherwise, we are at risk to say – "It is not a technology stupid". Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg