I had a chance to attend the first Siemens PLM components event in Boston. Navigate to this link to learn more about the event, agenda and participants. It was the first international conference for Parasolid, D-Cubed, Kineo and JT Toolkit. According to the website, the idea of the event was
… to exchange ideas, best practices and experiences. This will help us leverage each other’s successes and maximize your ROI in PLM Components. We will also present our vision for the future in the context of relevant industry trends like additive manufacturing, cloud deployment and Building Information Modeling.
I was able to attend only first day of the conference. I captured several notes and pictures and wanted to share them as well as my comments with you.
Businesses are moving to agile design process
Businesses are moving to agile methods. That was the main message from Jon Hirschtick, the co-founder and CEO of Onshape. According to Jon, agile process combined with cloud tools is a future of CAD, CAM and CAE. The following table gives you an idea about the differences between traditional and agile design processes:
Onshape full-cloud 3D CAD system is relying on Siemens Parasolid components. I captured a slide explaining why Onshape selected Siemens components:
Multiple cloud options is very expensive strategy
David Mitchell, CTO for Siemens PLM cloud services group shared his thought about cloud technology and strategy. One of the pictures I captured was about Amazon dominant position in cloud services.
My favorite comment from David was about multiple clouds. According to to him, it is possible to deliver solutions using different cloud technologies. But, this is very expensive option and an obvious question is why and how is that important for customers. The following slide demonstrates why the question about what cloud are you using might be irrelevant in the future.
CAD Software History Trends
Ken Versprille of CIMdata shared his perspective on historical trends in CAD. The following slide is an interesting presentation of what happened with engineering software for the last 45 years.
What is my conclusion? I was surprised by the number of vendors and diversity of solutions. Siemens PLM is most probably doing something right with their PLM components strategy and technology allowing to use it in so many products and companies. The most interesting thing is that these products are competing in the market. This is another reminder that engineering software market is highly diversified and one size doesn’t fit all. At the same time, we might see more components and services in the future that can be combined to provide a solution to customers. Cloud can be a technology to deliver it to users. 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. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.
