CAD, PLM and Future Cloud File Systems

April 8, 2013

Cloud is everywhere these days. It becomes a mainstream in our everyday life and it is coming to businesses and enterprises. Emails, photos, social networks, mobile apps… Cloud services and applications are destroying old paradigms and create new ones. One of the most powerful paradigm we developed for the last 20-30 years is folders and files. I’ve been discussing it in the past and want to get back to this topic again. You can navigate to few of my previous posts – PLM User Experience and The Evil of Folders and The Future of CAD without Files?

One of the most popular concepts of past 3-5 years was development of apps. The idea of Apps replacing everything got viral. Many people thought that apps are going to replace everything (including files and folders). I’ve been reading an interesting publication over the weekend – The Death Of The File System: What You Need To Know. The author is discussing the reason why folders and files systems will remain even after we move to the cloud. Here is an interesting passage.

No file system is a no-go. This is the deepest analysis I’ve found of a vision of a future in which "users simply have apps” and are not conscious of storage repositories. And it doesn’t bode well for workplace users. We may need new UX paradigms. Via JohnnyHolland: “Documents associated with them appear magically. Presto.” While this might sound like some kind of user experience utopia, I have a grave concern that eliminating a file system in this manner misses a huge audience. Us. While opening Pages to work on the family newsletter might make sense for casual home users of a computer system, it does not make sense in a professional context. In the professional world, we work on projects. Projects are composed of many different types of files. And yes, we might have the same apps open all day, but do we want to be forced to duplicate a hierarchy of information in every single application? No. Besides, “projects” are just one type of organizational scheme. As a user experience designer, I’ve seen a lot of professionals in other fields organizing a lot of stuff in a lot of different ways. So even attempts at inter-app organization around the concept of a project, such as Microsoft’s Project Center, are not effective replacements for an infinitely flexible organization scheme like simple folders.

The idea of new UX cloud paradigm emulating folders and files behavior resonates. It eliminates many problems and the biggest one – the need of customers to adopt to something new. Customers will continue to use existing paradigm and some of them even didn’t pay attention how they switch from proven file/folders environment to cloud storage.

The development of cloud platforms is going in parallel. Companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft and some others are spending billions of dollars building infrastructure transferring the data to the cloud. Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive, Apple iCloud – this is only a short list of services emulating cloud files/folders and allowing to us to store a conventional data (eg. files and folders) in the cloud. Navigate to the following article – Google Drive adds apps folders and customer properties for developers to learn about latest Google extension in that field.

The app data folder serves as a hidden storage space that developers can use to store configuration files and other important app data that shouldn’t be changed by the user. Files stored within an app data folder are hidden from both the user and from other apps. Only your app can see what is stored within this location. It prevents other apps from taking information from your files and also stops users from accidentally deleting core app files.

Google and other cloud infrastructure providers are making their cloud platforms fully transparent and available to store engineering data – CAD files, Excels, etc. CAD/PLM vendors are also working in the same direction. A good example – Autodesk 360 provides a convenient way to store files and other application data.

What is my conclusion? File system dead, long live "Cloud File System". I can see two potential trends related to the development of new cloud-based file systems and storage. First is related to existing applications – with the increased transparency of cloud file storage, I can see a renaissance of existing CAD applications in the cloud. It still hard to predict dynamic and interest, but I can clearly see how existing vendors will be trying to re-use it anyway. Second trend is related to establishment of new native cloud design systems (eg. Autodesk Fusion 360 or long time promised Solidworks Mechanical Conceptual). These systems will provide apps (or webapps), but will keep data (file) storage system transparrent. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Why versioning is complicated in PDM?

March 7, 2013

CAD-PDM-versioning.pngAfter 20+ years of CAD and PDM development, the issue of versioning is not solved. How about that? I hope, I’ve got your attention :) . Versions, revisions, changes, CAD models, drawings, parts… My experience is that as soon as it comes to engineers, revisions are getting messy. I touched it in my previous posts few times. If you want to refresh your memories navigate to Revisions in CAD, PLM, ERP: old problems or new challenges? A bit old (from 2010), but still very relevant post – Future CAD-PLM and Assembly Version Management. As a confirmation that topic is alive and not solved, I just read Minerva blog – Versioning, different meaning from one activity to another by Yoann Maingon. It is short a sweet, so take few minutes and have a read. Yoann is speaking about "difference in intentions". Here is the main point of the writeup:

…it is sometimes hard for people to have a common way to think about versioning. For the software development oriented person, versionning means saving or tagging. It means that the actual work has to be saved because we want to keep a state of the actual work. “I want to keep a state, I make a version, this version is stored”. In my view, related to main PLM concepts, versioning is creating something new. “I want to start a new work or I want to change a document, I version it. my new version is my working copy”.

If I speak about CAD/PLM software, here is the root of the problem. PDM systems create too many options in the mechanism of versions by implying "creation of something new" in place where it is absolutely unnecessarily. It was done by so many PDM systems in so many different ways with one common mistake – try to capture the intent of change and related dependent changes. The right answer to me is different. Versioning (and PDM is not different from software development and just Microsoft Word) is only about making "change" in the content (3D model, drawing, source code, assembly, configuration, etc). The role of PDM software is to capture the change and make it available for history tracking. You can ask me what about Parts, Revisions and other configuration management aspects? In my view, the answer on this question in the context of PDM/PLM is straightforward – use Parts, Part Numbers and Part Revisions (if needed).

What is my conclusion? Versioning is a mechanism that helps people to capture a change. Not the intent of change, but the change. It must be flexible and configurable, but at the end of the days, simple and reliable. I don’t want to miss my changes and I don’t want to run as a dog in order to find a right change. Most of PDM/PLM software created a complicated versioning systems. I don’t see much difference between PDM and software. With the amount of software code we have in products, these two options will come together sooner than later. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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PLM adoption and CAD management valley of death

March 5, 2013

The issue of PLM adoption remains critical, in my view. Even if we can see more examples of PLM implementations, companies usually consider "PLM project" as something that needs to be taken with care, significant amount of planning and justification. So, I wanted to ask "why it happens"? The traditional answer mostly coming from PLM vendors and PLM consulting is leading to the complexity of business processes, the need of people to change and technological challenges related to implementation and customization of systems. Usually, vendors and consulting are working with CAD/IT managers that lead "engineering part" of the implementation. In parallel, PLM consulting often dream to work with C-level people in a company to define better alignment of PLM strategy.

I want to raise a question of balance between engineering IT / CAD managers and more strategic PLM business planning. Here is the thing – even if companies are succeeding in making strategic planning for future business and product planning development changes, CAD management is still can create too many complication on the way. CAD management is complicated, requires lengthy implementations, data import and… more important – change the way engineers and designers are working by introducing "data management". The last one is hated by everybody hates because of complexity.

In addition to complexity, CAD data management introduces an issue of compatibility between different CAD systems and PDM components. New trend to solve this problem is to use PDM system of the same CAD vendor. It simplifies CAD/PDM integration, but introduces the problem of multiple PDM/PLM system integration. CAD management (PDM) projects often positioned as an introductory step in PLM implementations often end up as a long and painful journey.

What is my conclusion? In my view, CAD management is a valley of death for many PLM implementations. Many PLM consulting and even some PLM vendors are trying to avoid and position PLM implementations "beyond CAD/PDM". It certainly gives some advantages, but (in my view) just hides the real problem of bad engineering data management. Engineering data from CAD is an important element of change management and many other PLM-related processes. As we move to more agile and efficient product development process management, to solve the problem of CAD data management and PDM becomes very important. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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What Cloud CAD-PDM Hybrid Means for PLM?

February 10, 2013

To predict future is tough. Not many people are trying to do so. Especially in tech. Companies are juggling with buzzwords, powerpoints and software. At the same time, analysts are trying to swim into the social information stream of provocations, facts and opinions. There are two terms in manufacturing and product development software that created most of confusion for the last decade – PDM and PLM. Navigate to the following link to find lots of publications about the topic. To my taste, the topic PDM vs. PLM became boring. I’d even suggest to add it to the list of boring PLM topics introduced by Jos Voskuil.

However, here is some news. My blogging buddy and analyst Chad Jackson is predicting PDM revolution. Navigate your browser to read about future PDM Revolution. Chad’s take on PDM revolution smells cloud and two new cloud design systems – Fusion 360 and SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual. This is my favorite passage that summarizes Chad’s crystal ball prediction of Hands-Free PDM:

If you take a look at Fusion 360 and Solidworks Mechanical Conceptual, at least in my exposure to it, there’s no step where you explicitly save your design or model. It’s done automatically in the background. When you close your model? The latest version will be there when you return. What happens when you create variations on a design that amounts to branching? Look at the model history and you’ll see those various branches tracked for you. So if you think about it, it is essentially hands-free. It does the brunt of the work automatically and practically invisibly for you.

Sounds like revolution to you? I think yes. However, here is a deal. It impose a significant threat to the future implementations of PLM. The mess of data in your local CAD-PDM now moves to the next step of the product development. Until now, companies implementing PDM took an advantages of their PLM solutions from the same vendors to manage BOM and ECO processes integrated with CAD data. Cloud CAD systems are not there yet and probably will not be there. Integration becomes an imperative to make hands-free PDM successful.

What is my conclusion? Cloud CAD and hands-free PDM is a signal to think about BOM management. In a different way. They key words are "single" and "integrated". Without that, we will enter into the messy world of structure mapping and synchronizations. If you are vendor, you need to think about openness and web APIs. If you are a potential customer of a cloud CAD/PDM hybrid, ask vendors how flexible and granular is "save" function that turns your work into stream of information stored in database. The ugly truth is that until now, file structure was doing integration job for you. Not any more. It is gone. Forever. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Interoperability will play a key role in a success of future CAD/PLM

January 26, 2013

Data. Conversion. Interoperability. Translation. The discussion about these topics is endless in CAD/PLM world. Customers are looking for interoperability between different product versions, competitive products, data models, data formats, databases and geometrical kernels. Customers were always first impacted by problems of interoperability. The lifecycle of engineering and manufacturing work is longer than typical lifecycle of product version or even engineering IT solution. Technically, data interoperability is a complex problem. It is not easy to solve, even if you are want to do so. Evan Yares recently posted an interesting article about interoperability – CAD Interoperability today. Interoperability plays an important role in product lifecycle applications in large OEMs and Supply Chain.

Until now, the perception was that customers are most impacted from data interoperability problems. It was true until very recently. However, I can see some new trends and changes in this space . Consumerization, BYOD and cloud trends are introducing new elements and aspects in product development roadmaps. CAD/PLM vendors are forced to think about cloud and mobile development as well as potential disruptive competition coming from newcomers and other vendors. New design applications become more granular and focusing on a specific functionality or target customers. Two examples of recent announcements are Autodesk Fusion 360, SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual. These application were born to co-exist with old products. Existing products won’t retire tomorrow. The ability to re-use data with existing product lines such as Inventor (for Autodesk) and SolidWorks (for Dassault) and other CAD packages will be vital for success of new products. I’ve been reading GraphicSpeak – SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual introduced but not delivered article earlier today. Randall Newton is talking about the product SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual (SWMC) announced by SolidWorks during SolidWorks World 2013 in Orlando last week. SWMC is build on top of Dassault 3DEXPERIENCE platform. I found the following passage interesting:

Reading between the lines, so to speak, of what was said at SolidWorks World, it seems two critical challenges remain before SWMC will be a selling product. It must prove to be fully and seamlessly interoperable with SolidWorks, and it must be more cloud-based. Interoperability has always been a significant challenge in the 3D CAD industry. 3D kernels are complicated. Dassault’s 3D Experience platform uses the CGM 3D kernel; SolidWorks uses the Parasolid 3D kernel from Dassault’s rival Siemens PLM. Completely accurate automated moving of files from Catia V5 and V6 is not commonly possible, and they share the same 3D kernel. Most of us can only imagine the complexity of moving between CGM and Parasolid.

Granularity is one of the most trending topic these days. Everybody are thinking about Apps. Company are moving away from developing heavy and complex product suites towards granular applications. Al Dean of Develop3D wrote an interesting article about granularity few years ago – Why granularity is going to rock your future… This is my favorite passage:

There are two things that might influence this and push us into further levels of explicit detail and granularity. The first is the ‘cloud’ (yes, I broke my own rules). When you’re working on a system that’s remotely located on a server, whether that’s over your internal network or across the wider web, you’ll need to manage and exchange finite packets of information, features, sketch entities and such. To do that, you need to manage and keep track of those individual parcels of data and oackets of change. That’s going to require a level of granularity that’s way beyond what most data management systems are currently capable of. Consider what would happen when you start to work on today’s products, in a highly collaborative environment, where data is being passed globally, between teams, between languages, between professional disciplines. And you still need to track data down to this type of level. And when you’re working on a product that looks like X-Ray image.

What is my conclusion? I agree with Al Dean. We will see more granularity in data and new applications. Interoperability becomes a very important factor in a future success of new apps. New level of data compatibility is required. Vendors will be forced to improve the level of interoperability of their existing products as well as new apps. Interesting time and change happens these days. Vendors need take a note. Important. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Cloud CAD and what does it mean for PLM?

November 30, 2012

The topic of CAD (or 3D CAD) in the cloud is getting more traction. The first “CAD in the Cloud” announcement happened almost 2 years ago when SolidWorks introduced their technological work during SWW 2010. Read SolidWorks takes off to the cloud to refresh your memories. Back that days it raised lots of conversations, disputes and controversy. Here are few historical posts – The Death of SolidWorks? by Develop3D, If you wonder how SolidWorks Cloud will look like… by WorldCAD Access, Bertrand Sicot reinforces SolidWorks cloud plans by Deelip.com. One of the last publications by SolidSmack – SolidWorks 2013 and the promise of SolidWorks V6 can give you a good update of where SolidWorks stands now. Below is a picture of SolidWorks cloud prototype as it was captured by Deelip Menezes at SWW 2010. According to his post SolidWorks V6 is due in 2013.

In the meantime, we can see the idea of how to use cloud technologies for design and collaboration became more popular with new products and companies at the horizon. Here are few names you better pay attention to. GrabCAD is transforming from “Facebook for engineers” concept into a set of online collaboration tools. You can see a video of GrabCAD for Teams below.

Sunglass.io is another startup company, which is trying to use cloud and in-browser technology to introduce a fresh approach of collaboration and design on the web.

One more startup – TinkerCAD is approaching 3D online design and 3D printing combined as a new experience to work for engineers and designers on the cloud.

Moving from startups to large behemoths, earlier this week at AU2012, Autodesk just announced new product in Autodesk 360 product line called Fusion 360 – 3D CAD in the cloud.

3D CAD: Unix, Windows, Cloud

I can see a clear technological platform shift in the CAD industry. 3D CAD is moving from Windows (as a mainstream 3D CAD platform today) to the cloud. It happened in the past when 3D CAD moved from variety of UNIX workstations to Windows/PC platform. Similar shift is happening now.

3D CAD and PLM

What 3D CAD platform shift means for PDM / PLM? The significant portion of PDM and PLM business is tightly related to CAD systems. The connection between CAD and PDM/PLM was always “love and hate” relationships. Engineers are clearly hated PDM systems as something that interfered with their work. Seamless (embedded) PDM integrations were supposed to solve that problem, but faced technological complexity of implementation. CAD vendors’ competition made CAD-PDM/PLM relationships even more complicated. I can see 3 main trends that may happen to PDM/PLM with 3D CAD gearing up to the cloud.

1. Reduce complexity. Since communication between CAD and PDM/ PLM will move to the cloud servers, it will reduce the complexity that in many cases was a result of desktop to server communication.

2- Simplify user experience. Reducing of complexity will result in a streamline of user interface. No more awkward files, folders, lockups, and many other things that complicate user process.

3- Focus on business processes. I believe cloud CAD will reduce lots of data-management tasks that require use attention. It will result in the ability of user to focus on business process improvement.

What is my conclusion? Traditionally, CAD was heavy focused on desktop and file management. It included file management. All together create a complicated technological and user interface problem. Moving of CAD to the cloud can positively impact the ability to improve user experience and hide some complicated data-management activities from users. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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What is behind “GitHub for CAD” marketing buzz?

October 16, 2012

PLM and marketing are not good friends. Marketing did a poor job for the last 10 years for PLM. For many years, PLM was advertised as something that can do everything… and even coffee. At the same time, marketing is indeed very important. Especially, it is critical for a new startup company. Between two risks (technical and marketing), marketing risk is usually more costly and painful to fix.

Gen-Yers are coming to 3D, CAD and PLM

The following two press releases drove my attention during last two weeks. One of them came from Sunglass.io, which came out of beta stage announcing – the following – Sunglass Launches Web-Based Platform Out of Beta, Effectively Creating a ‘GitHub for 3D Design’. Press and bloggers cover this announcement pretty well. My favorite SolidSmack posted – Breaking: Sunglass.io blast out of beta, snags "GitHub for 3D design’ title. Here is how Josh describes Sunglass.io:

Sunglass wants to be the go to place for all things 3D+collaboration, even to the extent of adding plugin into the most common 3D software and combining cloud services such as rendering and simulation. They’ve added support for all the popular formats and plugins for SolidWorks, Inventor and Sketchup, with CATIA, Rhino and Processing plugins coming.

Sunglass.io press release outlines the following functionality of Sunglass.io: version browser, integrated plug-ins, share spaces, collaborative assembly for concurrent work, rich media annotation.

One more announcement came yesterday from another startup company – GrabCAD. Navigate to the following link to read TechCrunch article – GrabCAD Raises $8.15M From Charles River Ventures, Yammer Co-Founder & Others For Its ‘GitHub For Mechanical Engineers’. Here is my favorite passage from this announcement – GrabCAD says it will use the new capital to accelerate the company’s growth as it builds new collaborative tools to improve the design and communication processes in the “creation of physical products”.

I’ve been posting about GrabCAD several times. Take a look on one of the last posts – GrabCAD: From Facebook for Engineers to PLM? GrabCAD recently switched the strategy from "community for engineers" to "building collaboration tools to help design and build products". I recommend you the following read about GrabCAD on WIRED magazine – GrabCAD Is Building Community in 3-D. Here is an interesting part how Hardi Meybaum explains the problem GrabCAD supposed to solve:

The problem, he says, is that engineers create CAD files with offline desktop software and haven’t traditionally shared what they’ve made. Meybaum thinks that attitude is shifting. “The old way of thinking was that ‘products are my own and I don’t want to share them.’ But we’ve found that people want that to change because there are so many benefits in sharing and collaborating.” Those benefits include getting help fixing a mechanical problem, getting suggestions on how to improve a design, and learning tips from more experienced engineers when you’re just trying to get your start.

GitHub for CAD/PLM?

If you are building software these days, you should know GitHub providing free public repositories, collaborator management, issue tracking, wikis, downloads, code review, graphs and much more. Here is how Wikipedia defines GitHub -

GitHub is a web-based hosting service for software development projects that use the Git revision control system. GitHub offers both paid plans for private repositories, and free accounts for open source projects. As of May 2011, GitHub was the most popular open source code repository site.[3] The site provides social networking functionality such as feeds, followers and the network graph to display how developers work on their versions of a repository. GitHub also operates a pastebin-style site called Gist,[8] wikis for individual repositories, and web pages that can be edited through a Git repository.

So, why I think GitHub is a good association for new CAD/PLM? It represents a new modern web-based way to collaborate. It also includes community and project orientation . If you think about PLM marketing, you won’t find any new buzzwords here. Web based, collaborate, projects… All these words have been used by marketing wizards before. There is an imporant difference, in my view. GitHub serves the needs of a specific community of software developers. It heavily relies on paradigms of open source development and web. From that specific point, it combines two worlds – open-source software development and web-based work behaviors. Open-source software development has strong web roots. Because of this connection, things worked so successfully together.

What is my conclusion? GitHub for 3D. GitHub for Engineers. GitHub for Design. I think, what is behind "GitHub" buzzword is a try to change the way how people work together. Open vs. Close. Keep information vs. Share Information. You can continue this list. Technology is easy, but people are hard. Some of them, will see an increased demand for openness and share as IP problem (you can read about it here). On the opposite side (read here), you can see it as a big part of the future of the whole tech ecosystem. Today, Gen-Yers are trying to change the world by applying methods of work developed for the last decade in a public web. I don’t see significant technical risks in this process. Web-based collaboration technology is proven by many web applications. However, there is a market risk related to how manufacturing companies and engineers will adopt new methods of work. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Picture credit the carrierrocketter.

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PLM and Cloud File Sharing Bubble

September 14, 2012

File Sharing on the cloud. Who is not doing it these days? It sounds so simple and straightforward. Dropbox was one of the companies that pioneered the success of cloud file sharing and made it mainstream. Other large companies took the challenge. As a result, we have plenty of options to share our favorite pictures and other files online. Apple iCloud, Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive are just short list of products in this list.

Slowly, companies are moving to discover what is business value of file-sharing services for business. Dropbox is proposing Dropbox for Teams. Another popular solution in this space is Box.com. Two days ago, the following article caught my attention – Marc Benioff drops bombshell at TechCrunch Disrupt: Announces Box competitor – Chatterbox. This is my favorite passage:

…"Our customers have come to us and told us they wanted ‘Dropbox’ for the Enterprise. They want it integrated with our platform. They want our trust model, our security model. They want to have application services. They want to build apps with Force.com and do Chatterbox. They want to use Heroku and do Chatterbox. They want to use it on their own. So we have to step up and deliver Chatterbox," he said.

Cloud File Sharing for Engineers?

CAD/PLM vendors are not standing aside of this cloud-file-sharing story. You might be interested to read one of my previous post – Will Cloud Drive disrupt engineering collaboration? The idea of drop-box-like service as a foundation of the future PDM/PLM system isn’t new and discussed by many vendors, analysts and industry watchers. There are several products already available in this space provided by large and established vendors SolidWorks n!Fuze, Autodesk 360. In addition to that, I can mention few start-up companies moving in this direction – TeamPlatform, GrabCAD, Nuage.

Cloud File Sharing – how to make it different?

Cloud storage becomes a commodity these days. The short list of requirements is size, cost and reliability. How to compete with giants like Google, Microsoft and Apple? This is a place where lots of innovations can be applied. Engineering content is a tricky thing. CAD files are semantically rich and contain lots of dependencies. Services like viewing and direct uploading from CAD system are options to provide some differentiation compared to plain vanilla dropbox and other services.

What is my conclusion? In my view, we are in the middle of cloud sharing bubble. Storage becomes cheaper. So, we will see more companies trying to challenge the status quo of large cloud providers. The key element to success is user experience. Fewer clicks, seamless integration with CAD and other engineering system – this is a short list of potential differentiation factors. Just my thoughts… What do you think? What will be an important function to help you to share your design online?

Best, Oleg

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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What Big Query means for Big PLM?

September 12, 2012

CAD and PLM means a lot of data these days. Thinking about growing complexity of products, the amount of information systems needs to proceed is certainly growing. In order to keep up with a growing amount of the information CAD and PLM vendors will have to bring new methods and technologies of working with this information. Today, the majority of PLM technologies companies use in production is relying on SQL databases.

The following article caught my attention few days ago – Google brings BigQuery down to earth with Excel connector. Google announced BigQuery back in May 2012 as a service that allows you to run SQL query again a massive amount of data. The new feature allows you to upload results of Google’s query to Excel.

It made me think about the potential intersection between cloud technologies and needs of the companies to analyze and process a significant amount of data. Think about analyzes, supply chain, simulation and many other use cases. Google is always associated with the "brute force of computing services". In the future, we can see how technology similar to BigQuery can be available for engineers and manufacturing companies. To inspire your thinking about that, I could suggest you the following NYT article – The Brute Force Computing Revolution. This is my favorite passage:

The brute force computing model is changing a lot of fields, with more to follow. It makes sense, in a world where more data is available than ever before, and even more is coming online, from a connected, sensor-laden world where data storage and server computing cycles cost almost nothing. In a sense, it is becoming a modification of the old “theorize-model-test-conclude” scientific method. Now the condition is to create and collect a lot of data, look for patterns amid the trash, and try to exploit the best ones.

Brute force computing is behind Google’s successful language translation. By comparing thousands of Web pages in different languages to find patterns, in one year Google was able to discern and refine translation better than linguistic theorists had been able to do with their fancy programs for years. There is brute force in genetics research, too; machines plow though the data looking for novel patterns, which researchers then examine to see if they hold valuable insights.

What is my conclusion? I think we are approaching a moment of time when new technologies used on the web becomes available for masses for a very low price. I want to see how vendors in CAD and PLM world will be able to translate this opportunity into new products and services to solve design and product development problems. Customers are paying less attention on technologies today and more focusing on how to solve practical problems. Translation service is a perfect example of a practical problem to solve. Will CAD and PLM companies create new services that will unlock the power of cloud services to engineers? This is a good question to ask today. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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CAD/PLM Standards and Toothbrushes Problem

September 4, 2012

I’m about to start my journey back from Israel to Boston after a short family vacation break. Below is probably the last vacation picture I made. Now it is a time to get back to work and blogging. Over the past week after Autodesk-Inforbixannouncement, I’ve received many questions regarding the existence of Beyond PLM blog. So, to reconfirm one more time – Beyond PLM blog will continue. Everything you read on Beyond PLM is my personal own opinion and in no way represent the views, positions or opinions – expressed or implied of Autodesk Inc.

After such a peaceful picture, I want to bring a topic which far away from pastoral Tel Aviv sunset :) . The topic isn’t new. I want to talk again about CAD/PLM standards. Over the last weekend, I’ve been reading 3D CAD Tips blog post – Should you use JT or 3D PDF? The title is self-explaining. My blogging buddy Evan Yares brings the full set of controversy about choices between JT and 3D PDF. Take 15 minutes and have a read. I found it quite entertaining. The following quote is the most important one.

….one cannot let the limitations of any format (and they ALL have limitations) define the bar of success. The simple fact is that there is no one format (JT, STEP, PLCS, PDF, etc.) that will address the spectrum of critical use cases in an organization. We might wish that were the case, because it would make life simpler, but its simply not going to happen in the foreseeable future.

Toothbrushes, Standards and Openness

Thinking about vendors’ standards, I’m always comparing it to toothbrushes. Company (vendor) attitude towards the standards can be explained as the way they feel about their toothbrush – every company has one (standard). However, nobody wants to use anybody else standard (toothbrush). However, Evan’s point about standards and spectrum of use cases is important. About a year ago, I’ve been presenting it during Eurostep 2011 event.

The spectrum that needs to be covered is too big and an approach on having a single standard to cover everything is too naive and far from any practicality nowadays. In my view, "openness" is a word that needs to replace a word "standard" in a lexicon of CAD/PLM vendors. Openness can make things different. It brings a greater level of interoperability and flexibility. How to achieve it? This is probably a good question to ask and to discuss.

What is my conclusion? I think, we can live with multiple standards. I can hardly imagine the industry with a single standard like STEP, JT, 3D PDF and some other de-facto standards (formats) developed by vendors. At the same time, I’d really like to see how standards are converging towards openness and not feature-to-feature comparison. Just my thoughts.

Best, Oleg

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