One of the advantages of living in Boston area is to be surrounded by CAD and PLM companies. Long time ago, I called Yankee Division Highway (Route 128) surrounding Boston – PLM highway. The situation is a bit different now – Autodesk moved to Seaport district and PTC will be moving there as well soon. But the reality is the same – CAD companies are here in Massachusetts.

Tonight I had a chance to attend CAD Happy Hours meetup organized by Onshape at the office of Desktop Metal. John McEleney and Jon Hisrschtick open the event speaking about the reasons they decided to develop Onshape.

Ric Fulop, founder and CEO of Desktop Metal shared some of his perspective on 3D printing industry.

Two Onshape customers made very interesting presentations speaking about the reasons why they decided to use Onshape. You can see it below:

However, my favorite slide during from the event was the following CAD comparison made by Adam Sachs of Vicarious Surgical. See it below.

It made me think about trajectory of full cloud CAD tool such as Onshape and data management. For a long time CAD competition was about geometry and design features. It is still true… But, it looks like main reasons why customer decided for Onshape are actually related to data management, version control and collaboration.

Philip Thomas from Onshape called the problem customers are experiencing – design gridlock. It looks like Onshape is coming with the story about “gridlock” now as a demo of why companies should pay attention to CAD in the cloud and new type of data management for PDM.

What is my conclusion? Onshape is offering new type of data management – built-in into CAD system and transparently delivered from the cloud. It expands horizons how engineers are thinking about Data management (PDM) today. For long time, PDM was considered as “Add on” and in many ways it always brought very frustrating experience. Onshape seems to be flipping it up and built a system around PDM rather then following a traditional path. Data management is becoming more and more critical to manufacturing companies and hence is their interest about new data management technologies and paradigms. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

PS. Later this month, I will join the discussion panel at Develop3D Live event in Warwick speaking about Data Management 2.0. Check more here.

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.

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