Solidworks World 2017 have started yesterday in Los Angeles, CA. It brings ~5000 individual designers, companies, partners and vendors under the roof of Los Angeles Convention Center. I’m coming to Los Angeles for another event – Pacific Manufacturing and Design to demo openBoM (disclaimer I’m co-founder and CEO), but I might have a chance to visit SWW exhibition later this week. Meantime, I was skimming #SWW17 tweets while on board of the plane taking me from Boston to Los Angeles.
Marketing Vision
Here is a picture I captured at Solidworks World last year. Navigate to my blog to read more.
And here is a new SOLIDWORKS WORLD 2017 marketing slide.
You can see a difference. Solidworks keeps sthe same paradigm of multiple versions of clients supported – desktop, mobile and web browser. However, it doesn’t explain how all these multiple pillars will interplay with each other. If I’m a designer using existing version of Solidworks on the desktop, then how I can collaborate with my suppliers using Solidworks from a web browser?
xDesign
Solidworks is making continue process and moving forward to increase differentiation of xDesign. But the key message is that xDesign will run on all platforms and browsers
It seems like Solidworks is bringing some other elements to xDesign such as topology optimization. augmentation, etc.
Dassault 3DExperience vs Solidworks
I found heavy presence of 3DEXPERIENCE logos in Solidworks presentations. It is everywhere.
However, I found interesting tweet about how much irrelevant 3D EXPERIENCE for Solidworks users.
What is my conclusion? 7 years after historical SWW2011 when Jeff Ray announced first “cloud story”, Solidworks is making progressive move towards delivering Solidworks branded products on all platforms – desktop, connected native app and web browser. Solidworks CAM is an interesting move confirming a trend for personal manufacturing experience. From data management and collaboration perspective, it is not clear to me how Solidworks users will connect and work together. I guess, this is a function of 3DEXPERIENCE platform, but I didn’t find much information about it. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
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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
