Autodesk Forge and High Frequency Data

I’m digesting information from Autodesk Forge DevCon event I attended earlier this week in San Francisco. One of the technical keynotes on the second day caught my special attention. Thiago da Costa talked about future directions of Autodesk Forge platforms and more specifically about something Autodesk called “High Frequency Data”

Data is in the center of everything Autodesk Forge does. The end goal game of Autodesk Forge platform is to provide a distributed design data platform that can manage data and provide access to variety of data end point for applications developed on top of Autodesk Forge.

The next slide gives you an overall techno-marketing picture of Forge.

Pay attention of “low frequency data” and “high frequency data”.Thiago da Costa explained what is that. Look at the following picture.

From Autodesk standpoint, “frequency” applies to the changes. In a traditional desktop engineering applications data is residing inside of files. Autodesk developed these application for the last 30 years from early versions of AutoCAD. The data is in files. The only way to change it in the cloud is via upload and download. The new mechanism of “unbounded data” extract data from multiple file data sources and allows to update data on more granular level.

High frequency data approach allows to update data more frequently. How? It wasn’t clear from the presentation. At the same time, the intent of Forge is to coordinate the data flow between variety of applications and data sources via so called Forge HDFM (High Frequency Data Management).

What is my conclusion? The challenge is to manage wide range of data sources coming from multiple applications Autodesk developed for the last 30 years and new cloud data applications Forge platform and a combination of High Frequency Data Management and traditional File Upload/Download can provide an interesting data management solution. Every engineering and manufacturing organization has large assets in CAD files. New cloud data management can leverage from frequent data updates without requirement to upload and download data.  Take a not and learn more in the future when Autodesk will release software for public preview. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Want to learn more about PLM? Check out my new PLM Book website.

Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of openBoM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups and supply chain.