SolidWorks heads for the clouds

While few details were divulged as to how the company’s CAD and PDM products would operate, how much they would cost or how the whole system would work in general, the tech preview showed a future version of Solidworks operating on a Macintosh computer—not as a native application, but as a so-called Cloud application. The same concept was said to work on low-end netbooks, handheld devices or any platform that could run a web browser.

Advertisement

Solidworks “Sneak Peak” tech preview demonstrated a future Cloud Computing-based version of the design software running on a Apple Macintosh computer. The same concept would work for any platform that can run a browser (e.g. netbook, smart phone, etc.).

Ray said that the company had been working in secret for the last three years to leverage cloud computing in the CAD space—running engineering design software on a high-end servers and delivering the user experience to multiple platforms over the Internet. The benefit is that, eventually, users would no longer have to install and constantly update the software, upgrade hardware to take advantage of expanding software capabilities or cope with program instability trashing unsaved work.

In addition, Ray and the Solidworks R&D team demonstrated new direct editing capabilities in the tech demo. Up until now, Solidworks had pointed to Instant3D when asked about plans to roll out direct editing solutions similar to Siemens PLM Software’s Synchronous Technology and Autodesk’s Inventor Fusion, adding that those solutions don’t respect design intent or the ways designers work.

In the demonstration, Solidworks director of product and tech strategy, Joe Dunn, showed push-pull modeling on a Jaws of Life assembly.

"Let the system take care of the book-keeping, all the relationships, all of the bills of material or whatever the system has to do, in the background," Dunn said. "What this shows is the breaking down of the barriers between part, multi-body and assembly modeling by putting it all in one environment."

"What we’ve done is we’ve unified those two methodologies [parametric and direct editing]," he added. "We retain all the feature information, all the valuable information and the design intent and we didn’t have to convert it or use a different application to marry the two together."