Reflections on platforms, ecosystems, and how engineering workflows may evolve beyond files.
Earlier this week I attended 3DEXPERIENCE World 2026 in Houston. I was not there as part of the press or analyst community. I came to meet OpenBOM customers, partners, colleagues, and friends, to listen, and to understand what people are actually experiencing on the ground. Last week, before the event, I wrote the article – you might find useful to check it first. Here is the link On the Way to 3DEXPERIENCE World: The AI Boom, PLM, and Engineering Decisions.
Formerly known as a SolidWorks World, this conference is always a place to hear from key leaders in the ecosystem, industry, and customers. You can find amazing memories from people attending SolidWorks World for years. The first SWW was in Florida in 1999.
For me, attending SolidWorks World for more than 20 years, I’ve found the SolidWorks ecosystem to be extremely powerful, with people continually coming together to support one another and learn from the experience of others. It is one of the best places to feel what is stable, what is uncertain, and what questions people are quietly asking between sessions.
The picture above in the article is the best slide illustrating DS’s vision for SOLIDWORKS. I found it very futuristic and quite different from what SOLIDWORKS used to be and how it became one of the most widely adopted MCAD software platforms.
It made me think a lot about how we came here and what is next for SolidWorkers. It is my reflection on keynote, presentations, conversations and observations. It is an attempt to make sense of where the SolidWorks ecosystem – and more broadly engineering software – may be heading next.
It is very tempting to create a prediction whether current strategies are right or wrong. I’m not trying to do so so, but want to understand why change in engineering environments happens slowly, why some very promising cloud tools didn’t take off as expected and why some transitions that took years in other industries, are taking decades in CAD, PDM, PLM spaces with engineering and manufacturing applications.
After Houston, what struck me most was not what is changing, but what remains remarkably stable and why that stability matters.
The Status Quo Nobody Should Underestimate
It is difficult to overstate how mature and successful the SolidWorks ecosystem has become. After more than thirty years, SolidWorks remains a highly reliable and widely trusted mechanical CAD environment, supporting a business estimated around $1.5 billion annually and growing with high single digits pace. That level of longevity in engineering software is not accidental. It reflects something deeper than product and technology alone.
The foundation of this success is what I often call the Windows and desktop DNA of engineering. I first experienced it with worked with AutoCAD 9 and 10 back in 1990s. It was a foundation based on folders and files. For decades, engineering work has been organized around local applications, files, and clear ownership of those files. Engineers understand it intuitively. Companies have built processes around it. Suppliers, contractors, and partners exchange data through it. Entire organizations operate on the assumption that files represent the product and centrally located and available.
This model remains extremely powerful. SolidWorks eco-system is strong, Universities are teaching using SolidWorks (still a lot even some new tools are replacing them). Hiring a mechanical engineer with SolidWorks skills is straightforward. The workforce is large, global, and accessible. Combined with remote work environment , it is even stronger then when you expected to place all MEs in a single room or building. The availability of trained engineers at reasonable cost continues to reinforce the ecosystem. Familiarity creates stability, and stability creates trust.
Another critical factor is openness. This is not openness in the philosophical sense or vendor statement, but practical openness enabled by files. Files made integration possible. Files allowed partners to build tools around SolidWorks. Over time, this created a vast ecosystem of add-ins, integrations, and specialized solutions. Thousands of companies built businesses around this openness, and customers benefited from continuous innovation coming from outside the core vendor.
It is worth remembering that SolidWorks itself emerged as a disruptive force by dramatically reducing friction. In the 1990s, high-end CAD systems like Pro/ENGINEER delivered powerful capabilities but at high cost and complexity. SolidWorks applied a simple but transformative principle: deliver roughly 80 percent of the needed functionality at a fraction of the cost, running on accessible Windows hardware. That shift lowered adoption barriers enough to change behavior at scale. Within a few years, the competitive landscape changed dramatically, partners moved, and a new ecosystem formed around SolidWorks.
Successful ecosystems emerge when a tool reduces friction so significantly that people naturally change how they work. That historical success explains both the strength of the SolidWorks ecosystem today and the difficulty of changing it. Once an ecosystem reaches this level of maturity, inertia becomes a feature rather than a problem.
Platform Vision Meets Ecosystem Reality
Over the past two decades, Dassault Systèmes has invested heavily in platform thinking. Back in 2000s, DS came with the idea of placing their flagship CATIA product on the database foundation. Eventually with the acquisition of MatrixOne in 2006, it became a reality and Dassault introduced a PLM software concept bundled with CAD and later expanded them into the broader 3DEXPERIENCE platform vision. Architecturally, the logic is clear and compelling. Data and files must be organized. Products are no longer isolated mechanical designs. They are systems combining mechanical, electrical, electronic, and software components across a lifecycle that extends into manufacturing and service. A connected platform promises consistency, traceability, and collaboration beyond files.
From an architectural standpoint, this vision makes sense.
But… the challenge appears when platform thinking meets ecosystem reality. The introduction of 3DEXPERIENCE into the SolidWorks ecosystem represents an attempt to move customers beyond file-based workflows toward a more integrated environment. But migration of this scale is not a technical decision alone. It is human, organizational, and economic.
Engineering organizations have accumulated decades of data, processes, and habits around files. Suppliers expect files. Contractors expect files. Internal approvals and release processes are built around files. Even when companies intellectually agree with the platform direction, the cost of changing behavior often exceeds the immediate benefit.
This creates friction. The platform assumes a shift away from the Windows/file-centered model, while most customers remain deeply embedded in it. Questions about openness and control also emerge naturally. Ecosystems thrive when many participants can innovate independently, while platforms tend to centralize control by design. That tension is difficult to resolve quickly.
A platform controlled by a vendor cannot replace an ecosystem overnight. Ecosystems evolve gradually, and attempts to accelerate that evolution often encounter resistance — not because users reject innovation, but because the transition disrupts working systems that already function reliably.
If neither the old model disappears nor the new one fully takes hold, the natural question becomes: where does change actually happen?
The Emerging Shift: A New Center of Gravity Around Product Data
Listening to customers and partners throughout the week, it became increasingly clear to me that the industry may be asking the wrong question. The discussion often centers around which CAD system will win, how quickly platforms will be adopted, or whether cloud-native tools will replace desktop systems. But these questions assume that the next transition must look like the previous one.
What I increasingly see is that the future will not be defined by another CAD or PLM system, but by a new center of gravity around product data itself. Users and customers are focusing on what they created, their intellectual property, their ability to reuse knowledge, and their ability to run a business without being fully controlled by a vendor-owned platform. This is a reality.
At the same time, a new center of gravity in modern work is emerging at the data layer — a layer capable of absorbing files from existing tools, recombining them with data from across organizations, and creating the product memory needed for engineering and manufacturing teams to work more effectively. Efficiency and productivity remain central. In the 1990s, productivity gains were the reason tools like Autodesk and SolidWorks succeeded. The same principle applies today, but the bottleneck has moved from geometry creation to information organization.
Files created openness in the Windows era. They allowed different tools to coexist and enabled partners to innovate around them. SolidWorks became not only a CAD system but also a productivity platform because of this openness and the ecosystem that formed around it.
The next openness may come not from files themselves, but from connected data. Product memory – the accumulated knowledge about parts, decisions, suppliers, changes, and relationships – becomes the foundation for future workflows. Once product knowledge is connected, contextualized, and accessible beyond individual applications, new levels of productivity become possible.
This shift also creates the foundation required for AI to become practical in engineering and manufacturing environments. Intelligence does not emerge from isolated files or disconnected systems. It emerges when knowledge becomes structured, connected, and reusable across processes and organizations.
Seen from this perspective, innovation is increasingly happening between existing systems rather than inside a single platform.
What Happens Next and Possible Trajectories
Looking forward, several trajectories seem possible, and none of them are mutually exclusive. Here are four of them that I see happening in parallel.
Dassault Systèmes will continue evolving 3DEXPERIENCE. The investment is too large and the architectural vision too important to abandon. The article 37 Things that confuse me about 3DEXPERIENCE went viral and was acknowledged by DS management. They listened, but eventually missing the point thinking that introducing of better user interface for 3DX will fix the problem. Nevertheless, we will likely see continued attempts to reduce friction between the platform and existing SolidWorks workflows – still the adoption will be more incremental rather than transformational.
Competitors continue to push alternative models. Autodesk Fusion represents one approach, attempting to unify design and manufacturing in a cloud-first environment.
In the picture below, you can see Autodesk advertising near the Houston Convention Center during the event. It reminded me of the old competitive tactics from the 1990s, when billboards were a common way to make a statement.
PTC Onshape represents another, rethinking CAD itself as a cloud-native CAD and PDM system.
Both approaches introduce valuable ideas, but adoption remains uneven because they require behavioral change at scale. Replacing an existing ecosystem is significantly harder than building a new one from scratch.
At the same time, independent vendors and partners continue solving practical problems inside existing ecosystems. Many innovations today focus on connecting tools rather than replacing them. No clear leader has yet emerged capable of creating a new center of gravity for product development and engineering, but experimentation is clearly happening. I can mention here many founders and companies (including my own OpenBOM) where the focus on connecting people and data with the decision making – design, supply chain, manufacturing and other disciplines.
AI will likely act as an accelerator rather than a starting point. As data becomes more connected, AI capabilities become more useful. Without connected data, AI remains mostly a demonstration; with connected product knowledge, it becomes a real productivity tool. We are seeing a Cambrian explosion of tools and vendors in this space (e.g., Leo AI), with many experiments exploring how to better support mechanical engineers. The direction feels less like disruption and more like gradual reorganization.
What is my conclusion? And open questions to my readers…
I’m coming from 3DXW 2026 with a lot of observations triggered by conversation and meetings with customers, partners and friends. I can see where Dassault Systemes is pushing SolidWorks customers and I am left with more questions than answers. Here are some of them:
Can platforms evolve in a way that absorbs existing ecosystems rather than attempting to replace them?
How long will the industry tolerate parallel experimentation before convergence begins?
Will AI accelerate change, or will it reinforce existing tools by making them more efficient?
Will SolidWorks eventually be replaced, or will it continue to evolve and extend its role inside a broader ecosystem?
And perhaps the most important question of all – what kind of tool or approach could realistically trigger the formation of a new center of gravity, in the same way SolidWorks once did by dramatically reducing friction and making powerful capabilities accessible to a much broader engineering audience?
Just my thoughts after Houston…
Best, Oleg
Disclaimer: I’m the co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM, a collaborative digital thread platform that helps engineering and manufacturing teams work with connected, structured product data, increasingly augmented by AI-powered automation and insights.
