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Another viewpoint by Ralph Grabowski
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When it comes to high-end MCAD, Dassault Systemes is the go-to company. Its software designs most of the automobiles we drive and aircraft in which we (used to) fly. It is on track to exceed $5 billion in revenues.
Growth is good, but wouldn't more growth be better? And so over the last decade Dassault went on an acquisitions spree, buying up software adjacent to its main Catia design package, such as geology. To get out of the CAD rut, the company even targeted fashion and consumer goods, going so far as marketing software that determines where to best place products on store shelves. Consumer goods is a field, however, in which it faces many established competitors.
With the awe-inspiring success of Frank Gehry using Catia for iconic buildings, surely Catia would be ideal for the architectural side of the design market. (I'll let you in on the secret: I understand that Gehry himself never used CAD; only his assistants did.) As a result, the folks at Dassault spoke passionately -- for many years -- about their plans for AEC, but perhaps ended up speaking too long. While Dassault was busy being passionate, BIM was busy overwhelming regular 3D. Dassault had no BIM with which to enter the market, and so today it emphasizes using its 3dExperience software for the mechanical side of architecture, such as fabrication, simulation, and generative design.
The Medical Market
What would be a much bigger market than CAD and is in desperate need of digitalization? If you guess "construction," you'd be right. But, in the case of Dassault, you'd be wrong.
The focus of the company's high-energy CEO Bernard Charles is on medicine. Last fall the company completed its largest acquisition ever, spending US$5.8 billion to acquire Medidata Solutions. Dassault is convinced that it "will become Dassault Systèmes’ second largest core business, after transportation and mobility." The company already had a footprint in this area with its Biovia software for modeling materials and chemicals.
It's easy to see why Dassault likes Medidata. It earned nearly a billion euros last year and is the primary reason Dassault will soon exceed five billion in revenues. The software runs on Medidata's own Rave Clinical Cloud system to store and distribute medical data, which nicely matches Dassault's own cloud-centric stance.
Dassault's first CEO Francis Bernard is, however, not so sure about the acquisition. "With the medical domain, it is not a differentiation, it is a new business. Our competition will come from players other than those in the PLM business," he said in an interview.
Dassault is already describing its medical platform as the "virtual twin experience of humans," mimicking the digital twin strategy popular in CAD today. (See figure 1.) People are, however, not things.
Figure 1: The product life cycles of Dassault Systemes Solidworks Stays Solid
This is the tenth anniversary of Dassault's failure to turn Solidworks into a cloud-based product, one that began under the name of "Solidworks 6." The collective yawn from users towards the incompatible xDesign-series and other missteps by Dassault became repeated failures.
The difference in cultures between Paris and middle-America don't help. Paris-based Dassault doesn't understand why desktop users wouldn't want to leap at the chance to move to the cloud, touting the benefits of sharing (with other employees), sharing (with clients and manufacturers), and sharing (with other 3dExperience modules). Literally, we had Dassault executives last year asking the stolid Solidworks crowd to please cheer for one or another new 3dExperience-related feature.
Meanwhile, middle America doesn't understand the need to replace a great-working independent desktop system by a system that costs more, works differently, and depends on a solid Internet connection. This is how great-working Solidworks is: it is the world's most popular MCAD software, that boasts a million commercial users (and five or six million education users), that last year sold 81,000 licenses -- double that of Autodesk Inventor -- and that last quarter provided Dassault with 20% of its revenues.
For 2020, Dassault Systemes twisted the knife a bit deeper by renaming the beloved Solidworks World as "3dExperience World." (3dExperience is the name of Dassault's company-wide platform.) I don't know what kind of discussions went on in the background, and maybe none did, but the Americans managed to wrap their own "Solidworks Live" nomenclature around 3dExperience World to make the new name look subsidiary to the old one.
More unhappy news for users as CEO Charles warned that "we are going to progressively introduce the idea that subscription will be mandatory" for Solidworks.
Every couple of years, Dassault changes the 3dExperience-based software it offers Solidworks users and changes the names in the hope that this -- finally! -- will entice them to 3dExperience. These are the programs on offer this year:
- 3D Creator for creating and reviewing regular 3D models from solids (includes xDesign)
- 3D Sculptor for making organic shapes from 3D meshes (includes xShape).
See figure 2.
[Figure 2: User interface of software offered by Dassault to Solidworks users
Solidworks 2021
During Solidworks Live earlier this year, we got to see a few of the new features coming in Solidworks 2021. The list seemed to me to be sparse compared to other years. This could be due to the programmers not having progressed very far yet, or it could be an AutoCAD-ization of Solidworks, in which the new feature set is greatly reduced. On to what's new:
When you use silhouette defeaturing in Solidworks 2021 to simplify a model by removing unneeded details, you can now save the silhouette as a configuration within the current model, so that it doesn't need to be stored in a separate file.
Sheetmetal lets you place edge flanges on curved tangent edges. (See figure 3.)
Figure 3: Solidworks 2021 placing a flange along a curved edge
The Color Picker lets you pick up a color from another document in other programs, and then apply the color to the model in Solidworks. This seemingly minor function is surprisingly useful, as I have found from using color pickers in other software.
You'll be able to edit legacy dimensions in drawings, as well as create, edit, and dimension drafting views like details and breaks. (See figure 4.) We've seen this level of detailing functions in other CAD programs, so it's good to see them beefed up in Solidworks. Along with new ways to annotate drawings, you will be able to place hole callouts on holes made by the Hole Wizard and by extruded cuts.
Figure 4: Enlarged detail view in upper right of drawing
Some tweaks are being made to simulation, such as getting more accurate results from bonded non-planer contacts that have variations in the meshing. Blended curvature-based meshes are faster and just as accurate.
Dassault expects to ship the new release of Solidworks in the fall.
What Ralph Grabowski Thinks
Solidworks is the AutoCAD of the mechanical design world. Both programs are old, but keep on doing what their users need them to do. In the main, the market for both CAD systems consist of one- and two-man shops, and in the case of Solidworks, primarily it's for making steel parts for customers.
That Dassault Systemes feels compelled to mess with a successful formula remains a puzzle to me, given that ten years of messing hasn't worked. For some, no egg can be golden enough in their effort to kill the goose. How golden? The company looks forward to Solidworks becoming a billion-dollar business.
And so it appears to me that Dassault seems to have switched its strategy, from trying to kill Solidworks to trying to milk it as a cash cow, and even is copying Autodesk's apparently successful strategy in (a) reducing the new feature count while (b) forcing mandatory subscriptions on customers. Even pirates will be converted, the company's executives think; Autodesk used to think the same.
If nothing else, Solidworks users can take comfort in Dassault CEO Charles declaring that the 25-year-old program will be around for another 20 years.
https://www.solidworks.com
[This article first appeared in Design Engineering and is reprinted with permission.]
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This is really a great eye opening article. I use solidworks everyday at work. Though cloud based has its benefits, I live in an area with sometime poor internet connection. I rely on this software to Get my job done and get our production facility accurate and high quality production drawings. If Solidworks starts getting phased out to introduce a new system, it will cost us years of learning and hard work to get our drawings where they are. Thank you for the eye opening article. I will be keeping closer tabs on this and think towards what our futures may look like I’m the solidworks and 3D design world. Thank you so much for this article.
Posted by: Josh Hixon | Monday, July 13, 2020 at 09:18 AM