Autodesk Fusion360 and Onshape technological trajectories are getting close

An interesting news came yesterday from Develop3D – Autodesk launched project Leopard – Fusion 360 in a browser. Which brings a new swing into technological trajectories between two front runners of cloud CAD world – Fusion 360 and Onshape. Here is a quick explanation about what does it mean:

Codenamed Project Leopard, this sees another to access Fusion’s tools made available, directly in the browser. If you’ve not played with Fusion 360, while the data is stored and synchronised with the cloud, the majority of the functions are held in a locally installed client. That’s not a traditional install, rather it updates itself automatically and streams the updates in. This is a different beast. Grab your Fusion 360 log-in (assuming you’ve been accepted), log-in and the tools are there. No install, no client.

It’s also key that this shouldn’t be seen as “Fusion Moving to the Browser”. Nope. This looks to be about giving folks access to their data and tools in those cases where they need them and the software isn’t to hand, can’t be installed or in emergencies. That’s something we know, from our own research, is what’s driving an interest in the cloud-based technologies.

A video below (credit to Develop3D article shows how it works).

Earlier on my blog I shared my thoughts about development of Fusion 360 and Onshape as well as discussion between Carl Bas and Jon Hirschtick. If you missed that, navigate to the following blogs to catch up – Carl Bass and Jon Hirschtick are in agreement about the future of CAD and Autodesk and Onshare are disagree about cloud technology and focus.

The news about Project Leopard is confirmation that Autodesk didn’t sleep for the last months since Onshape turned on its beta version. And it looks like Al Dean was looking at the right crystal ball back in April, 2015. Here is his passage from the article  The cloud- a bright future ahead.

Eventually, Fusion will be available via the browser (I’d put a fiver on that being before the end of the year). And hopefully, OnShape will have a way of working when you’re offline, as well as internet connected.

I’d love to have an opportunity to try Fusion 360 in a browser and share my take about how data management (PDM) functionality is integrated.

What is my conclusion? I think we are far from normalization in a cloud technologies between different players in CAD and PLM market. There are lot of moving pieces. Project Leopard is an additional confirmation to that. I guess we are going to see many of such examples in a near future related to variety of technologies CAD and PLM vendors will introduce on the way to leverage cloud technologies. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg