Cloud and CAD are probably getting to the point where it starts become a real thing. Autodesk Fusion360, Onshape, SolidWork Industrial design. It is likely to absorb some PDM functionality to make collaboration, branching, revisions and other data management tasks easier. Cloud CAD means no files, so engineers have nothing to mess with… Life is getting more Googley if you read John McEleney Onshape blog.
However, here is the thing… What if (for some crazy reason, which is easy to imagine when you deal with engineers :)), customer will decide to do a work with two cloud CAD systems? It is not unusual to see multiple desktop CAD systems in engineering organizations, so why cloud CAD will be any different.
In my yesterday blog – Cloud CAD infrastructure is getting more PDM-ish, I draw the picture of cloud CAD/PDM bundle helping us to collaborate and manage revisions. Now how two cloud CAD systems will work together? I’ve been trying to bring my cloud imagination and thought about Google Docs and Office 365 services co-existence. Actually, it is not very nice story- I can easy get my files distributed between my Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive accounts. So, what if my parts will be stored on Google Drive and Assembly on Dropbox? Not sure I will like it…
Similar problem in PLM world created many debates and issues. Do you remember Dassault CATIA V6 story, which required ENOVIA backend to run it? It made few customers unhappy when they discovered that they need to run two PDM/PLM systems. I can see some similarity with multiple CAD/PDM cloud bundles co-existence and interoperability.
What is my conclusion? How engineers will collaborate using multiple CAD cloud software? Cloud technology is great, but it looks like cannot magically resolve some old fundamental problems of multiple systems, collaboration and interoperability. I wish cloud CAD / PDM vendors will think about it upfront before customers will find themselves in the middle of messy CAD / import/export/migrate data scenarios. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
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