Unless you lived under the rock for the last 3-4 years, you probably heard one or two times about Onshape. A brainchild of a group of ex-Solidworkers with a leadership team including Jon Hirschtick, John McEleney, Dave Corcoran decided to take a fresh look and to create a modern CAD circle 2015. If you noticed, Onshape recently released Data Management 2.0 and Onshape Enterprise subscription. Both events made me think about new value proposition of Onshape which more and more reminding me PLM development.
My attention was caught by Onshape article Onshape Enterprise gets CAD data in the hands of who needs it was a great example that made my “aha moment” about Onshape development.
Before I will jump into the story, I want to bring the following picture shot I capture last week at ConX18 conference in Chicago. As you can see from the research done by CIMdata, leading consulting and analyst company in PLM, in real life PLM systems are not more than CAD file data management, search and share functions.
And this is what seems to be the target on Onsahpe. As much as I can see Onshape is creating an outstanding cloud technologies. However, from organizational standpoint, Onshape enterprise it is targeting mainstream PDM / PLM functions. I created the following table to compare traditional PLM functions with Onshape enterprise features.
Not sure about you, but for me the similarity is obvious. And this is very interesting signal shows that Onshape is potentially can grow to compete with PLM vendors using more efficient CAD data management and collaboration technologies.
What is conclusion? Onshape technologies are uniquely position collaboration, data share, and viewing capabilities features today provided by most of PDM systems. Will Onshape sell them against PLM vendors? This is an interesting question we don’t know an answer for the moment. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
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
