The path towards ubiquitous CAD cloud drive

I’ve been talking about future of cloud file system and CAD data trajectories the other day on my blog. It goes back and connected to multiple discussions about future of file system. What will be future of file systems and file paradigm. Can we announce the death of file system? So, file system is dead, long live cloud file system. The cloud eco-system is developing fast and I wonder how CAD companies will keep up with the speed of changes, environment, technologies and adoption. One of the things is related to cloud storage. Navigate to one of my earlier posts to read more – CAD companies and cloud storage strategy. One of the main points – storage is a temporarily market.

It looks like CAD companies are certainly following the trend. Autodesk just recently released a completely refreshed version of Autodesk A360 Team version of project based collaboration tool. Navigate here and you learn more about how to share documents and cloud storage. Here is a short passage, which summarize A360:

Our customers are in the business of creating things and they organize people and data around their business and their projects. A360 is a tool that brings together people, design and project data, ensuring everyone is informed and involved.

My attention was caught by another announcement few days ago – MySolidWorks Drive. According to SolidWorks blog MySolidWorks drive provides a way to collaborate on data located on public cloud – Google and Dropbox. 

Connects cloud-based file storage services, such as Dropbox and Google Drive with MySolidWorks. MySolidWorks Drive enables SOLIDWORKS users to view their designs online with the eDrawings online viewer and easily share large designs files with manufacturers, colleagues and vendors from anywhere.

I captured few screenshots showing more details about MySolidWorks drive from Michael Lord’s blog.

Both examples made me think again about transition of design environment to the cloud. The biggest challenge here is to operate in the environment with mixed data. Existing design data is heavily persisted on engineers desktops and company shared network drives. At the same time, new products are providing customers with the opportunity to improve design collaboration using new modern cloud environment. The third factor is related to mainstream cloud providers. Cloud storage is a temporarily market and cost of storage is decreasing very fast.

Autodesk and SolidWorks examples are not unique. Recently, on my blog, I was talking about cloud file sync features developed by Kenesto. In addition to that, you might remember by discussion with Hardi Meybaum of GrabCAD about CAD file sharing collaboration tools.

What is my conclusion? We are coming to the point of potential collision between CAD vendors strategies and giant cloud vendors strategies. Customers are tempted to move their data to Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft One Drive, Box.com and other non-CAD specific cloud storage. At the same time, CAD and other engineering software vendors are developing cloud collaboration software with specific value proposition tailored to engineering and CAD specific data. How new CAD collaboration and data management products will navigate in such environment? This is a good question to ask. My hunch, cloud file collaboration will be in a focus of all CAD vendors in a near future. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg