In the days when Parametric Technology Corporation (now PTC) introduced parametric design to the world in 1988, it was normal to run MCAD software on the Unix operating system, because it was more powerful than DOS. Then everyone moved to Windows. PTC was one of the later ones switching to Windows, and now it is late in moving to the cloud.
Cloud MCAD, Not So Much
As it turns out, it's probably okay for PTC to be late to the cloud, because most of its competitors are stumbling in this area (c.f. Dassault's 10-year failure with Solidworks), or are having half a leg there (c.f. Autodesk's hybrid Fusion), or are simply ignoring it (c.f. Siemens with NX). For collaboration and online storage, sure, it makes sense; for hardcore MCAD, less so.
The notable exception is Onshape, which spent $100 million over six years to arrive at a pretty good cloud-only MCAD program. By Onshape's own metric, however, it was unsuccessful: "We want this to be as widely used as Acrobat and PDF files." It's not. Onshape had five thousand paying customers by the time it sold itself, down from ten thousand beta testers. There even was chatter at the time of Onshape displacing Solidworks, which today stands astride one million commercial customers.
(As a point of comparison, SpaceClaim apparently had 30,000 customers at the time it sold itself to ANSYS for $85 million. When it launched in 2007, SpaceClaim's claim-to-fame was in popularizing direct modeling. Just about everybody scrambled to copy it; just about nobody scrambled to copy Onshape's pure-cloud offering in MCAD.)
Onshape is PTC's Shortcut
When PTC CEO James Hepplemann spoke last November about his company's acquisition of Onshape, he stated that it would also have cost PTC several hundred million dollars but taken five years or longer to develop its own cloudCAD software. This tells me that PTC had not gotten very far in its own attempt.
Last November, the plan was this: Onshape would be a new SaaS [software as a service] SME [small and medium size enterprises] revenue stream for PTC, to be sold along side Creo (formerly Pro/Engineer) for large corporation. Some of PTC's software would be ported to Onshape, the first being in the area of generative design. With PTC positioning Onshape as their second CAD system alongside Creo, customers now had a choice: cloud or desktop MCAD. (PTC prefers using the term SaaS over cloud.)
On the Shoulders of Atlas
Last month, PTC announced a radical new strategy named "Atlas." Atlas comes from the name of the god of the ancient Romans on whose shoulders the world rested. Onshape is to become the shoulders of PTC as the company ports (eventually) most of its software collection to the cloud-based Atlas platform. Instead of Onshape coming to PTC, PTC is coming to Onshape.
Vuforia Chalk with AR and markup (all images PTC)
The master plan calls first for Frustum generative design and Vuforia AR [augmented reality] to be ported to Atlas by the end of this year. Based on past experience, expect them next year. Software like Vuforia is already cloud-based, but, PTC concedes, it will have to be modified to work with the Onshape engine. Other programs by PTC, whether in SaaS form such as Windchill PLM [product lifecycle management] or on desktop, will be ported in the years following.
Also, think plug-in architecture. Anything missing from the Onshape-Atlas platform will be added as plug-ins, such as Vuforia-style visualization.
Onshape Was Never About CAD
At its core, Onshape is not a CAD system. As its co-founders patiently explained over and over, they began by building a server-based database-driven collaboration engine, because that's what's needed as the foundation for cloudCAD. Once they had that working properly, they added MCAD on top because that's what they knew best from their days at Solidworks.
 Onshape with version control
This is why Solidworks and Onshape both run the same Parasolid kernel, a thorn in the side of Dassault and a headache for PTC, which runs its own Granite kernel. This may be why Mr Heppelmann predicts, "At some point [Onshape] actually will look materially different than what we acquired from Onshape, because we've taken it in other directions."
Why PTC May Win
The premise behind the promise of the cloud was that it would scale to infinity. (It can't, and even if it could, you couldn't afford it.) It also promised us that our IT headaches would be taken care of, because we'd be paying someone else to take care of the headaches, through off-premise servers.
It turns out that the #1 concern in CAD is not IT, but IP [intellectual property] protection. PTC's premise is that its cloud is already offered on-premise, a.k.a. the local cloud, where some firms feel IP is protected best. It knows this from the experience it gained after many years of Windchill SaaS installations, and so it knows that this is what corporations want.
On-premise deployment may, however, pain the Onshape folks, who were adamantly against the private cloud: "Users who require that can stick with traditional CAD" was their blunt take-it-or-leave-it response, a somewhat harsh deviation from their usual "gosh, folks like you" marketing stance.
"And so what we'd like to do, is somewhere down the road," said Mr Happlemann, "we [will] have a complete, 100%, SaaS-based, closed-loop, lifecycle management suite that passes that 15-second test. You click on a link, and within 15 seconds you're in any part of the suites doing anything that we can do."
Closed-loop is PTC's term for using all of its software -- CAD, PLM, ALM, SLM, IIoT, SCM -- and using it in a manner similar to what other firms call a "digital twin."
So, plug-ins + cloud = Atlas. It appears that PTC is headed in the direction of Dassault, which implemented a similar system a decade ago under the name of V6, now 3dExperience -- or maybe not.
Six years ago, PTC planned to use its newly acquired ThingWorx IIoT [industrial Internet of things] platform for unifying everything. It even renamed its annual user conference after it, LiveWorx. Back then, the plan was this: "PTC sees the code-less mash-up technology [from ThingWorx]... to create a unified user experience and workflow."
Why PTC Might Not Win
A myth promoted about subscriptions is that customers can add and subtract seats as demand for their design services fluctuate. In reality, CAD vendors don't want you doing that. Your desire for flexibility impacts their the bottom line negatively. For PTC today, 95% of its software revenue comes from subscriptions.
And so this is how Mr Heppelmann last month reassured financial analysts, who were worried that the coronavirus-induced recession would impact PTC's revenues: "The thing you have to understand is [customer] contracts. Once you sign a contract, if somebody comes and says hypothetically 'We'd like to renegotiate that', our reaction is, we wouldn't.
"There's a whole lot of contracts we have that we'd like to renegotiate. We have a lease on a brand new headquarters. It's been empty for six weeks. I'd like to renegotiate that, but the vendor doesn't seem to want to renegotiate it with me.
"So I'm just saying these are contracts, that there isn't renegotiation unless there's something in it for us too. Simply taking [seat numbers] down would just be a win-loss [win for the customer, loss for PTC] and difficult to get us to sign up for that." The approach may not necessarily reassure future customers.
The Story of Chalk
During this season of coronavirus, PTC has been marketing Vuforia Chalk as its #1 response. Think AR-based [augmented reality] redline markup on phones. Normally Chalk costs, but to the end of June (and maybe later) it's free. I tried it out and found that Chalk works on only a very limited number of Android phones, and not fully on my recent-model Android 10 AR-capable smartphone. (Chalk also works on iPhones and in Web browsers.)
 Vuforia Chalk promotion on PTC Web site
So, here is the altruistic side of PTC: "By making Chalk free for the crisis period, we eliminated sales friction and quickly introduced AR for the first time to thousands of companies who were desperate for an immediate solution." Chalk traffic soared 10x, according to PTC's CEO.
And here is the sales side: "These companies using Chalk represent a big upsell pipeline to pursue in Q4 and beyond."
What Ralph Grabowski Thinks
PTC has a ton of useful software that surrounds its core CAD system, all the way from technical documentation to augmented reality. In that, it has a compelling story. Yet it has failed to capitalize on its story in the way that Dassault Systemes and Hexagon have, each of which has revenues that are 3x larger.
Nevertheless, the company sees Onshape putting PTC in the forefront of SaaS-based MCAD through the new Atlas platform. "PTC is going to press our advantage as hard as we can," says the CEO, "and try to be the company that brings this [MCAD] industry to SaaS." He admits it will take a lot of work and will take years, despite the head start Onshape has given them.
PTC has, however, a history of becoming distracted from its core constituency. I am of the opinion that at a point in the future, perhaps just a few years from now, the company will distract itself away from Onshape. If you don't care for where PTC is headed, then wait a few of years. It'll change.
https://www.ptc.com
|
Comments