The announcement made by Dassault System last week, made me think about a huge distance CAD industry passed for the almost 50 years, since Ivan Sutherland first time demonstrated “Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System“.
In order to prevent a discussion between Autodesk Alias and CATIA Sketch folks, I just decided to put these two videos. I think, in terms of contrasts, they are both valid comparison to what was done 50 years ago.
What is my conclusion? There are no conclusions on Sunday . I’m prepping for AU2011 and even more to speak at AU Innovation Forum on Tuesday. For those who are on the way to Las Vegas, hope to catch up and see you there.
I like searching for new technologies. One of the technologies I’m following a long time already is so called “mashup technologies” or just “mashups”. In the past, I shared some of my thoughts about mashups. Navigate to the following link to read – Will Mashup Grow Up in PLM? Read the blog post Actify Centro and Microsoft SharePoint: 3D Mashup by Chad Jackson. The information in this blog post about new product Actify Centro made me think about what is the future of 3D mashup and what value proposition Centro can provide to engineers in manufacturing companies?
Actify Centro in a Nutshell
So, what Centro about? According to the press release, Centro delivers a new platform for delivering 2D and 3D product data that can be configured according to the requirements of the customers. It supposed to provide an answer to the problem of growing volumes of data (2D and 3D) and integration to other sources of data. The following description is from Actify Centro website:
Centro enables manufacturing organizations and their supply chains to easily access, interact with and communicate part data through SpinFire across their wide area networks. All major 3D and 2D CAD data formats supported. No CAD system required. One solution does it all.
Take a look on the following video explaining about Centro. According to the information in Actify press release Centro is focusing on Enterprise wide access to CAD files, cost effective archives of CAD files, quick and easy collaboration capabilities with 2D/3D product data and remote access to product data.
If I will follow Jackson’s blog, Centro provides additional capabilities such as integration with enterprise systems and cross-enterprise system search. Combined with 3D visualization and presenting of enterprise information on top of 3D visualization, this is what Chad called 3D Mashup. Centro completely relies on the Microsoft SharePoint infrastructure and functionality related to data integration and search. According to the same blog post Centro developed as a set of SharePoint web parts. Integration functionality relies on the usage of web services. This is a place where Jackson criticizes the approach. This is my favorite passage:
Actify’s Centro offers web services to integrate to these systems and databases. However, as those enterprise systems are upgraded, then Centro’s web services need to be checked to ensure they are still working and fixed if they are not. Some resources will be needed to maintain and plan out the integrations on a go forward basis. Is that a resource that comes from the corporate IT teams? Does the resource come from the engineering IT team? Is it an engineer doing it on the side? Obviously there needs some planning.
This is an obvious disadvantage and will require some integration services to be applied during the system implementation, which is probably having no difference with techniques used by SharePoint integration technologies (i.e. BCS, etc.)
3D Mashup Alternatives
Actify Centro discussion made me think about potential alternatives. From my standpoint, the best alternatives can be found in the portfolios of PLM mind-share leaders – Dassault Systems and Siemens PLM. Dassault V6 platform provides a comprehensive platform to centralize data, including 2D and 3D information. V6 user interface, introduced at first as a product called 3D Live allows you to merge 3D information with information coming from other systems. In the following video, you can see how ERP information mashed up with 3D view.
Enovia platform provides federation capabilities to integrate data coming from other systems. It will obviously require some integration plugins, services similar to SharePoint integration mentioned in Actify Centro.
You can find another example of similar functionality in the product called HD3D supplied Siemens PLM. HD3D focuses on how you can present product information in a contextual way integrated with 2D or 3D view. The following video can give you a glimpse of what you can do.
Future vision of HD PLM from Siemens PLM can finally put you in a nirvana of the future manufacturing dreams.
What is my conclusion? I have mixed feeling about my 3D Mashup reality check. The obvious part – engineers and not only need to have a better and easier access to product information resided in multiple places. So called “3D Mashup” user experience is slick and provide an interesting approach. Granularity is an important concept that was raised in Jackson’s post. It confirms the reality of multiple systems future in companies. Manufacturing companies don’t believe any more in the building of a single data management system combining all information. The obvious concern is the cost of the system and required service to connect all systems together and maintain it up and running. The last create an “open ended” feeling about the overall system cost. Just my thoughts…
It is almost two years passed since I put on my blog a question about FREE as a best future CAD/PLM. Navigate to the following link to read my PLM Prompt: Is Free the Future of PLM? I’m monitoring ideas coming of this FREE space. There are few interesting events that happen in this space, that caught me to think again about that.
DraftSight
Last year, Dassault Systems released DraftSight, a free CAD Software for your DWG files. In addition to that, Dassault introduced an idea of community where people can exchange ideas. Dassault introduced the platform called 3DSwYm (See What You Mean). Draft Sight community is one of available communities on the 3DSwYm. The following video gives you some information and feeling about what Dassault sees behind the DraftSight.
You can see a new CEO of SolidWorks, Bertrand Sicot is talking about the level of DraftSight adoption: 300000 downloads, 66000 activations, 16000 members of DraftSight community.
Autodesk 123dapp
A couple of weeks ago, Autodesk CEO, Carl Bass attended Wierd Business Conference. You can read an interview with Carl Bass by navigating to the following link. At this conference Carl Bass announced the launch of a new consumer product called 123dapp. Here is my favorite passage from Car’s interview:
A free, downloadable design tool, 123D allows anyone to design 3-D models, and then turn them into real-life products.“It usedthat in order to make things you needed these big expensive machines,” Bass said. “Now you can produce things at highquality, at relatively low volume and relatively low cost.”
You can see a fragment of the interview with Carl Bass on the following video.
What is my take on this? I think we can see a very interesting dynamic. Both Autodesk and Dassault are playing with the power of free options on the competitor’s side. Known as a strong provider of 3D CAD (both CATIA and SolidWorks), Dassault released 2D CAD for DWG files for free to attract AutoCAD users. On the other side, the introduction of 3D CAD free downloadable 3D design tool, by Autodesk – a king of 2D draft package (AutoCAD) is another interesting step, which is probably has an intent to disrupt 3D CAD business on the low end. I hope to learn more about 123dabc as well as about future Free CAD products in 2d and 3d. Just my thoughts…
Few days ago, I attended webinar One the Edge with Cadalyst – MCAD Smackdown: Direct vs .Parametric CAD. Navigate to the following link to listed the recorded podcast. An interesting comment was made by one of the attendees during the conversation about what is the better 3D option – 2D simply works. Yes, 2D works [...]
. I’m prepping for AU2011 and even more to speak at AU Innovation Forum on Tuesday. For those who are on the way to Las Vegas, hope to catch up and see you there.
I like searching for new technologies. One of the technologies I’m following a long time already is so called “mashup technologies” or just “mashups”. In the past, I shared some of my thoughts about mashups. Navigate to the following link to read – 
