A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Multi-CAD and PDM: Dead Lock?

Multi-CAD and PDM: Dead Lock?
Oleg
Oleg
17 February, 2012 | 2 min for reading

This post was provoked by twitter conversation between me, Jonathan Scott of Razorleaf and Brian Roepke of Autodesk. Let me give you a context. During SolidWorks World general session yesterday, Jonathan commented about coming SolidWorks EPDM integration with DraftSight – free CAD software for your DWG files.  I thought, it might be beneficial to have DraftSight integration with Autodesk Vault. However, it appears to be a mistake. Watch that…

This conversation made me think again about what happens in the space of integration of product data management products and design software. Time ago, I posted – Immersive CAD management: is it the CAD / PDM future? Another post related to the same topic was – Back to basics: Multi-CAD and PLM. Last year, I posted CAD, PDM and PLM diversity. What I found common between all these cases is that I can see more and more stable bundles between CAD and PDM systems.

I can see an increased demand for better data-management functionality in CAD systems. The integration of data-management applications increased over the past 2-3 years. Vendors started to think about PDM functionality like revision management and vaulting as a standard function in CAD applications. Dassault V6 took this process even future and introduced CATIA V6 bundled with ENOVIA server.

In my view, CAD-PDM integration played a significant role in the first wave of broad PDM adoption. Multi-CAD support was (and still is) considered as an important function of PDM (and sometimes even PLM) system. To support heterogeneous environment, pure play PDM/PLM vendors must include multi-CAD support. It happened almost to all vendors in PDM/PLM space. On the opposite side, CAD/PDM vendors decided to strength their bundles and prefer to integrate data-management systems only with their own CAD systems. In my view, Multi-CAD integration is a painful issue for pure-play PDM/PLM vendors like Arena, Aras and future others. The complexity of CAD integration with PDM and PLM systems create a significant competitive advantage for CAD vendors to bundle their own PDMs right. At the same time, PDM providers from CAD vendors are less interested to provide support for “non-home-based” CAD systems.

What is my conclusion? I can see a certain dead-lock between the need for multi-CAD PDM systems and interest of CAD/PDM vendors to protect their business. Customers are demanding PDM systems like TeamCenter, Autodesk Vault, SolidWorks EPDM to support Multi-CAD features. However, it looks more and more like a dead-lock. PDM system will be embedded into CAD environment and will become part of the whole design environment. It doesn’t mean new innovative companies won’t try to break this dead-lock. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

[Update]. I keep open conversation with participants of this tweet-chat. You can expect some updates about the topic very soon.

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
1 November, 2017

Continue my thoughts about 3DEXPERIENCE platform and Dassault Systemes strategy related to organization transformation, I was reading CIMdata – Dassault...

19 January, 2019

My recent article Can we liberate product data from PLM vendors and dissolve it with digital thread raised a good number...

28 April, 2013

APIs. Just to eliminate any possible confusion, API stands for Application Programming Interface. Wikipedia provides very straightforward definition of API...

27 May, 2020

Lionel Grealou posted open for debate article – The Place of PLM in the Digital Future (open to debate). I...

9 July, 2014

Navigate back into histories of CAD and PLM companies. You can find significant involvement of large aerospace, automotive and industrial...

12 September, 2009

Web is coming to every place. I think in retrospective and see web as a next big change in the...

4 November, 2010

I read David Dillon blog post on SolidWorks Geeks – File Name and PDM. This short write-up made me think about...

27 January, 2011

Almost two years ago, I published the following post – Virtual World: Where is the boarder between game and PLM...

23 August, 2009

The following article got to my attention this morning. Newsgator started back in 2004 as RSS syndication and stretching their...

Blogroll

To the top