The world is changing fast. What was near to impossible 10 years ago tomorrow, becomes a reality today. It related to the field of engineers as well as to the software that used by people and manufacturing companies. One of the factors impacting everything around us is the internet. It brings unknown before opportunities and new problems. An example of creating a different way to work is a community website for mechanical engineers GrabCAD. Earlier, this week, I was following an interesting discussion on various aspects of GrabCAD development on Matt Lombard’s Dezignsuff blog. Take few minutes to follow the discussion and opinions on Matt’s blog. This discussion made me think about the internet, new openness and future of business models.
Non-systematic definition of GrabCAD
I had a chance to look over what GrabCAD is doing and posted about them on my blog before – The Future of Engineering Communities and Manufacturing Crowdsourcing and Cloud PLM opportunities. Take few minutes to read and make your opinion. Deelip Menezes was describing what his opinion about the future of GrabCAD. He was consulting GrabCAD back in 2010. Here is an interesting passage from Deelip’s blog:
To put it simply, GrabCAD is a free online CAD library, not very different from other online CAD libraries. But the CAD library is only a first step. Pretty soon, GrabCAD will evolve into an online Engineering marketplace where members will be able to post Engineering projects and other members will be able to bid on them…GrabCAD will have an eBay style rating system where a member can start building his “reputation” by fulfilling projects, uploading his personal models for others to download and use, etc.
Hardi Meybaum explains GrabCAD using words “Crowdsourcing and Open-Engineering”. Navigate to the following presentation to learn more. In my view, it confirms plans of GrabCAD to develop future online applications in the field of engineering and manufacturing. You can think about Facebook apps applied to CAD domain. It obviously brings lots of questions related to IP – copyright, reuse and many others that needs to be handled on time.
DMCA and Engineering IP
I can see Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is one of the fundamentals of online business when it comes to Copyright protection. History already created few examples when companies protected their work using DMCA. Among them, there is a famous Google-Viacom and some other cases. At the same time, I never heard about application of DMCA to the field of CAD models, engineering IP and some cases discussed in Dezignstuff blog.
Respect Engineering Community
From my experience, engineers are special kind of people. In the past, SolidWorks developed a very successful community that respects engineers and their work. That’s why we had a chance to see so many SolidWorks works online – blogs and shared online materials. You cannot see such amount of online work related to other CAD systems. GrabCAD is actually proven in GrabCAD’s infographic:
To respect engineers is one of the fundamental thing that can create a successful engineering and manufacturing community. Last changes in GrabCAD that allows you to report this model and upload notification shows that GrabCAD is listening. At the same time, in my view, it happened very reactively.
What is my conclusion? Future engineering environment will be different from what we see now. It will be driven by new technologies and business opportunities. It will take time to develop them as well as to adjust existing legal definitions. Clearly, GrabCAD is trying to innovate in this space. Future development of GrabCAD depends on many factors and events. It looks like a fast drive on a narrow path between IP of engineers and manufacturing companies, legal rules and business interests. As we know from the history of the internet, driving fast can bring you a speed ticket . Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
Freebie. GrabCAD didn’t pay me to write this post.
What do you think about the future designer workspace? I assume some of my readers remember drawing board in multiple variation when it was a primary working place for engineer and designers.
However, time is running fast, and we probably need to think about the future of engineering workspace. Few years ago, Microsoft was talking about surface computer. I was monitoring recent CES event in Las Vegas and trying to find anything that can lead me to the future trends. 82 inch Gorilla-glass multitouch display was presented by Perspective Pixel. I didn’t find any engineering and design examples of such big-screen usage, but I can imagine them.
Now let me dream a bit about the future. I was laughing some time ago, when the following set of Steve Jobs pictures was published - iPhone, iPad, iBoard, iMat.
At the same time, things can become serious. Navigate your browser to the following article in MacLife. Rethink Apple- iDesk.
What is my conclusion? Thinking 10 years ago, it was hard to predict today’s computing realities. At the time when computers soon to become accessorizes (e.g. iWatchz), the future of iDesk for engineers can become a reality in 5-7 years. Just my thoughts…
The amount of publications about PLM and cloud is growing. This is not surprising me. There are two reasons to that. Cloud is clearly hyping. Second – major player such as Autodesk is making their move towards the cloud. Carl Bass, Autodesk CEO announced that today’s technologies allow to Autodesk to come with a reliable and affordable PLM system. Almost at the same time, during DSCC 2011, Bernard Charles is announcing that DS invested about $2B in the development of the most sophisticated online cloud platform in the word (he was talking about Enovia platform).
I was reading ECN article Seeing Past the Clouds – PLM and what’s What? by Eric Marks. The article is speaking about trends in the cloud PLM and four possible strategies: public, private, community and hybrid. I can clearly understand the difference between public and private (read one of my previous posts – PLM Cloud: dedicated, private, public). However, the concept of community cloud is a bit complicated, since it is point on how cloud services will be used, rather on if it goes to public servers and multitenant opposite to private server placement. At the same time, I found the passage about “hybrid cloud” the most interesting. Here it is:
And lastly there are “hybrid clouds” where a private cloud can extend onto a public cloud for specific activities and on an as-need basis. The benefit of a hybrid approach that incorporates a public cloud is that it provides extra performance scalability for the private cloud that would be in use.
I can clearly see how it can make a difference. I’m sure you’re familiar with Basic Instinct movie. Let me make an association with IT. The basic IT instincts are control and cost. As I’ve been told by IT people in one of the manufacturing companies in Mid West – if the cloud is be more cost-effective for effective for us, we will be moving towards the cloud. Otherwise we stay in our racks. Hybrid model allows to keep IT on premise and extend to cloud in order to have a cost effective expansion and scale. It sounds like something that can keep everybody happy and, at the same time, it is clearly Trojan horse that cloud providers will put in organizations. As soon as such solutions will be running in production, rest of the game for cloud providers will be to leverage the economy of scale and not to blow up “security” red-herring.
Another passage from ECN article practically confirms that.
According to Edward Quinn, Mevion Medical Systems IT Manager, “to do this, Mevion is leveraging a “hybrid cloud” in order to be able to scale quickly and efficiently to distributed cloud data centers at far less cost than purchasing expensive equipment or renting/building out corporate data centers. The IT department can leverage the advanced international infrastructure already in place by leading cloud computing companies and activate and pay only for the services that its business needs.”
What is my conclusion? There are many reasons why companies can decide to move towards the cloud – better collaboration, ease of install, mobile, and many others. However, the cloud fundamental is about how to drive costs down using the economy of scale. PLM won’t be an exclusion from this game. In order to move towards that, vendors need to pass “IT police” in every organization. Hybrid cloud looks like a good weapon leveraging IT basic instincts. Just my thoughts….
Simplification is a significant trend. I’ve been watching it a lot in consumer space. People got really obsessed by simplification after Apple. And these are all good things. However, I want to come back to something I call “simple PLM”. Well, you can tell me it is a joke… maybe. First time I put a [...]
Do you have any plans to develop enterprise software in 2012? Interesting set of predictions is coming from Christian Verstraete and his HP blog about cloud software. Christian is Chief Technologist of Cloud strategy at HP. Navigate to the following link to read more. One of the predictions about cloud (no surprise, since this is what [...]
There is a lot going on in database space these days. Few days ago I posted – PLM, RDBMS and Future Data Management Challenges and I’ve got quite a few comments discussing multiple data management and modeling topics. My main point in that post was an alert to PLM to wake up and check how [...]
About a year ago, I published my post – Will PLM Channels Survive The Cloud Era? Back that time, it was my answer to the growing amount of voices about so-called “cloud killing channels”. My conclusion was that re-sellers and service companies will be changing their priorities to answer on growing demand of implementation consultancy. Earlier [...]
Beginning of the year is a time for New Year resolutions and “annual predictions”. Few days ago, I shared my plans for Beyond PLM activities in 2012. To predict what is going to happen during coming year is usually very thankless work. In the middle of December, I’ve made my broad prediction that 2012 is [...]
PLM is a costly piece of software. Software licenses, installation, implementation, support, services. All these components of PLM software make the decision of manufacturing companies to adopt PLM software questionable. In the past, out-of-the-box solutions promised by software vendors claimed to decrease PLM software TCO. However, it was only a promise. These days “cloud” perceived [...]
Companies are looking for differentiation in the way they are making business. PLM companies are not different. Dassault, PTC, Siemens PLM, Aras, etc. Nobody wants to sell “me too” cocktail nowadays. With the last Autodesk PLM announcement, it became clear that Autodesk is targeting a “cloud PLM” place. During the recent AU 2011 conference in [...]
The world is changing fast. What was near to impossible 10 years ago tomorrow, becomes a reality today. It related to the field of engineers as well as to the software that used by people and manufacturing companies. One of the factors impacting everything around us is the internet. It brings unknown before opportunities and new problems. An example of creating a different way to work is a community website for mechanical engineers GrabCAD. Earlier, this week, I was following an interesting discussion on various aspects of GrabCAD development on Matt Lombard’s Dezignsuff blog. Take few minutes to follow the discussion and opinions on Matt’s blog. This discussion made me think about the internet, new openness and future of business models.
. Just my thoughts…
