For several days in mid-February the cowboys in downtown Nashville Tennessee had to make room for 6,000 Solidworks users, developers, and resellers as the city became the temporary capital of CAD during the 3Dexperience World 2020 conference -- the former Solidworks World.
The new name was not chosen randomly by Dassault Systèmes. It reflects plans announced last year to develop applications that integrate into the 3Dexperience Works platform, with Solidworks as the flagship. A key event at the conference this year was the presentation of the new platform that combines online technology, a suite of applications, and a new licensing system.
Everyday users of Solidworks, who have little interest in corporate branding tactics or in predicting trends from the future, couldn’t easily figure out why they didn’t see the name of their favorite CAD program at the conference. "Solidworks" had been replaced completely by "3Dexperience Works" on the first page of the conference program, on participants’ badges, the T-shirts, and souvenirs. (See figure 1.) Unaware users, who upon first seeing the bold 3Dexperience logo, might even have thought that they had gotten lost at the wrong event in Music City Center, the huge conference forum in which the conference was held.
Figure 1: 3Dexperience World branding replacing Solidworks World
In his comments to the press, Solidworks CEO Gian Paolo Bassi (see figure 2) noted that the conference’s rebranding a posed considerable risk, and one that the company’s management took because they were confident that Solidworks users would benefit from the opportunities offered by the new 3Dexperience Works system.
Figure 2: Solidworks CEO Gian Paolo Bassi
The Business of Solidworks
Solidworks has become one of the most recognizable brands in the CAD industry, and even beyond. Although it does not hold a monopoly position (as the 3D CAD market of tools is sufficiently diversified), it has a market share of 20-45%, depending on the method of calculation. It has six million users worldwide, of which more than one million are professional engineers who purchase commercial licenses; the remainder consist of primarily educational licenses.
As a business, Solidworks is doing better than most. Over the last year, its sales grew by 11% to nearly US$900 million, earning more than 20% of Dassault Systèmes’ four-billion in revenues for 2019. As a point of comparison, Dassault’s flagship MCAD system Catia generated US$1.2 billion.
With this unparalleled success in mind, one can ask a logical question: why does Dassault want to rebrand a product that is so much in demand and sells so well?
Ten years ago, Jeff Ray, a former Solidworks CEO, openly discussed how the company had begun a secret 'kill Solidworks' project. (For details, see the “The Death of Solidworks” article on Develop 3D.) A new generation of modeling tools would replace Solidworks. The plan was to develop the new product on top of the same technology platform that Catia V6 uses, using the CGM core from Catia's geometry kernel, replacing Parasolid that today is still used in Solidworks. Many of the ideas in the areas of Web access, collaboration, and integration with CATIA remain relevant today.
(I’d like to note that those development efforts involved us at LEDAS. We collaborated with Dassault Systèmes on the development of a geometric solver that is built into Catia as a CGM component, and because of this we also were involved in those works for Solidworks.)
Fortunately for users, the Solidworks revolution did not occur at that time. Soon after, Dassault Systèmes announced a new concept with the release of its 3Dexperience platform. It replaced PLM. (See article on the Moscow Dassault forum in 2012, albeit in Russian.)
Alternatives based on 3Dexperience, like xDesign, failed to gain traction with Solidworks users. And so the paths of the parent and its subsidiary diverged as plans to merge Solidworks and Catia were postponed to another time. The time has arrived after ten years, except that this time it looks like evolution instead of revolution.
Roles, Web, Subscriptions
Technologically, the 3Dexperience Works package is a set of applications/roles that are downloaded and installed on the computers of users (like Solidworks), or else are accessed online via a Web browser.
Special attention in 3Dexperience Works is given to “roles.” Each user has a specific role, for example, as a 3D sculptor or a 3D creator. For each role, the 3Dexperience platform has specific applications: xShape for 3D sculpting, xDesign for 3D creating.
An example of a role-playing scenario was presented to us, which created a conceptual design of the sensational Tesla Cybertruck using 3Dexperience Works applications. (Jokers in the CAD industry hypothesized that Cybertruck is so crudely polygonal because Tesla designers did not want to exert themselves with A-class surfaces and their subsequent tessellations and renderings.) All team members were involved in an online collaboration, using the same data, and all their activities were part of a continuous development cycle.
It will be possible to store 3Dexperience Works data in the cloud, which will help avoid problems typical with file exchange. File transfers and data conversion between applications are performed in the cloud using native tools. Messaging takes place through 3Dexperience Forum. At some point in the foreseeable future, you will be able to use applications from the CATIA ecosystem, which is one of the significant advantages of the platform -- at least, this is what Dassault management expects.
As not everyone accepts this way of working and not everyone trusts cloud storage, existing file processing methods will also be supported.
All application updates will be installed automatically, so users no longer need to remember version numbers. The “platform” version of Solidworks will also be updated automatically. In some industries (the field of medicine, for example), certified updates are required for each new software version, and so automatic updates do not need to be an option for them. Dassault Systemes hopes for rapid changes in legislation, as today most Web application updates go unnoticed by users, and this practice is becoming the industry standard.
Three types of licenses -- Standard, Professional, and Premium -- provide a set of applications that include Solidworks Standard, Solidworks Professional, and Solidworks Premium. (See figure 3.) It was emphasized to us that the old licensing scheme and the usual Solidworks installation methods remain. However, the company will encourage users to switch to the new commercial offer because it is more beneficial and more convenient for them.
Figure 3: New licensing stacks for SolidworksAI, Machine Learning, APIs
In recent years, one of the hot topics in IT [information technology] is the breakthrough in the field of artificial intelligence with machine learning, and the resultant avalanche-like growth as these technologies penetrate various fields. Traditional CAD systems lag behind in AI [artificial intelligence], because not many design tasks are particularly suitable for machine learning.
Solidworks developers decided to fill the gap by releasing several features in xDesign, xShape, and 3D Sheet Metal Creator based on geometric data processing and machine learning. As Gian Paolo Bassi described them, these are “little delighters” that help in automating some of the dull and time-consuming user actions. In his opinion, machine learning in these cases works just awesome.
What was actually implemented:
- A tips system that suggests the use of certain modeling features based on the operations performed by users earlier
- Recognition of user-created patterns on two-dimensional sketches
- Automated method of adding mates to assemblies
Solidworks plug-in developers are obviously very much interested in an API [application programming interface] for 3Dexperience Works. Would it be possible to develop new applications and customize existing ones? There is no answer to this question yet, but the good news is that the ecosystem and capabilities of the desktop version of Solidworks remain the same, so you can continue using your own and third-party plugins.
The Future of 3Dexperience
Dassault Systèmes CEO Bernard Charles guided a tour of 3Dexperience and noted that he is glad that the community is growing. (See figure 4.)
Figure 4: Dassault Systèmes CEO Bernard Charles at 3Dexperience World
In between, he mentioned a concept new to Dassault Systèmes: the use of digital twins for human beings. What Mr. Charles talked about became clear only a few weeks later, when it turned out that this new concept of “creating life” is already replacing 3Dexperience.
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Nikolay Snytnikov is the chief operating officer at LEDAS. He has long been involved in the management and development of key geometric components of CATIA.
[This article first appeared on the isicad Web portal at http://ledas.com/news/854-solidworks-at-3dexperience-world-2020-a-new-platform-role-playing-and-machine-learning/ and has been edited for brevity.]
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