Category Archives: CAD

Andreessen Horowitz $80 Million Funding in Onshape is a BIG deal

September 27, 2015 By in CAD Tags: , , 2 Comments

27 Sep 2015

During a conversation I had with John McEleney, President of Onshape last Monday, he told me why it was a big deal to Onshape.

Onshape was not actively looking for additional investment. Their original investment of some $60 million was sufficient for at least the next year. Rather, Andreessen Horowitz approached them. Of course, McEleney was excited that Onshape was able to more than double its investment, and with the backing of Andreesen Horowitz, raised some $80 million in the round.

What is very attractive is that this investment round comes from the leading high tech investment firm and they get why Onshape is different. You can read about why Andreesen invested in Onsape from Peter Levine’s article entitled “CAD Emerges from the Stone Age to Finally Join the Mobile Era.” Levine is a partner at Andreesen Horowitz. Levine, in the article claims that Onshape truly changes the game in CAD for the first in the last 20 years. Not that the last two decades have not contributed substantially to the field; it’s just that this time has been spent working with the same old, stand alone computer technology. In this new era, systems that embrace document sharing, collaboration, cloud storage, and being mobile-native will rule the roost. Of course this perfectly describes the path taken by Onshape.

What’s surprising to me is that none of Onshape’s competitors seem to have any existing or planned offerings in this arena. It’s not like this is a big surprise either. We have known about Onshapes plans for several years now. I guess, as has been common in the past, it may take several more years, and substantial revenue loss before they wake up to these rapidly approaching changes.

As always, I welcome comments.

Ray Kurland

The future is cloud-y for engineering data management

February 8, 2015 By in 3D Design, CAD, New Technologies, PLM Industry Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Feb 2015

Lately I have been deluged with the announcement of or introduction to a series of cloud based data management systems for design engineering that are also focusing on collaboration. I plan this blog to be the first in a series that explores new PDM/PLM (PxM) solutions for product design.

Before I begin, we need to clarify the differences between PDM and PLM. PDM manages design changes during product development while PLM manages engineering and other changes made after the production release of the product for manufacturing and other downstream processes. Using this definition, PDM can be used to store all sorts of information during the design or work-in-process stage. Such information might include, but not be limited to: product specs, preliminary designs, analyses and simulation, product versions, QC specs, engineering BOMs, material types, etc. PLM manages engineering and other changes made after the release of the product from engineering. PLM systems might include PDM data managed during design as well as other data, such as, manufacturing BOMs, manufacturing instructions, NC data, service tracking, cost data, customer level documentation, etc. I think you get the picture.

PTC’s recent announcement of PTC PLM Cloud, a webinar I attended about GrabCAD Workbench and Onshape’s inherent use of a cloud-based solution — all piqued my interest. I began wondering about the differences between them and how one might choose a solution for a mid sized firm. One obvious differentiator is how cloud based PxM software connects to CAD software, be it desktop CAD or cloud based CAD. By the way, if you have not seen Onshape’s Dave Corcoran’s blog about the “The blue screen of death,” then I urge you to read it now. http://www.onshape.com/cad-blog. Corcoran discusses some of the benefits of a cloud based PxM – CAD implementation.

A true cloud based system allows full use of easily extensible computational capability and virtually unlimited storage

A PxM system cloud based system may not be much different from the tired old server based software that has been promoted for years. Adding a web based interface and hierarchical data storage in the cloud, masks an antiquated architecture. The old approach of bolting external data management software into CAD simply does not work well enough. It’s too laborious, takes extra time, and makes little use of design info developed automatically during the design cycle. It’s lack of adoption to date verifies this assumption.

A true cloud based system should be radically different in architecture allowing full use of cloud system flexibility. For instance, one reason I always disliked the previous generation of PDM/PLM was their outdated reliance on text-based interfaces. I would expect modern PxM systems to be graphically oriented offering comprehensible and visual navigation within the product structure. It should offer a tight connection to related CAD systems and automate much of the data management function. Automatic backup and easy restore of historical data are mandatory functions, as are easily distributed design among partners along with IP (intellectual property) protection.

The vendors are all moving quickly to position (or re-position) their PxM systems as cloud based

The plethora of cloud based data management systems for engineering and CAD include the following (plus some I haven’t yet discovered): Autodesk PLM 360, Onshape, GrabCAD Workbench, PTC PLM Cloud, and Kenesto as well as Dropbox and related cloud drive systems. More traditional software is offered by ARAS, Dassault Systemes and Siemens PLM software. What follows is a summary of how some of these vendors are positioning their software.

  • Onshape promotes distributed design. Using cloud based CAD along with a fully integrated cloud PDM system allows a brand new perspective on how modern CAD systems should work. Essentially all costs for compute power and data storage are greatly minimized, easily increased, even ”borrowed” for a short duration.
  • GrabCAD’s Workbench calls itself “The fast, easy way to manage and share CAD files without PDM’s cost and hassle.” The company goes on to state “Workbench allows teams on any CAD system to work smoothly together by syncing local CAD files to cloud projects, tracking versions and locking files to prevent conflicts.” The enterprise version costs $89 per month.
  • PTC recently announced PTC PLM Cloud, stating “this solution leverages the power of PTC Windchill, while simplifying PLM adoption with a flexible, hosted subscription offering, deployable at a pace that matches the needs of SMBs.” I am not exactly sure what this means, but expect to clarify this when I speak with PTC this week.
  • Very soon, Kenesto plans to announce a cloud based system that, Steve Bodnar – VP of Strategy, calls a terrific solution for small shops, enabling them to replace their server based, in-house error prone, file based systems with a much higher function cloud based system that requires minimal change to the way CAD users work, yet improves the reliability of their data management.

Alas, how can an engineering organization differentiate which PxM technology to buy and invest their time and money in? More detail about various implementations and my assessment of them will be forthcoming in future blogs.

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Ray Kurland — I have returned to consulting and analyzing systems for TechniCom, from an early and erstwhile retirement.

References:

Onshape: I have seen it and it is good!

January 21, 2015 By in 3D Design, CAD, New Technologies Tags: , , , Leave a comment

21 Jan 2015

I cannot yet discuss Onshape details, having agreed, as did all others who viewed the product, to an all-encompassing non-disclosure agreement.

But surely, others must have noticed the recent activity from Onshape. After more than two years of secrecy, their executives and others in the company are finally reaching out to the public. Just last week I had three calls from Onshape execs, all wanting to make sure I was aware of their product beta. Within the past two weeks they have started a blog, which now has two posts. See it at www.onshape.com. The first posted just two weeks ago was from Jon Hirschtick, Founder and Chairman of the Board at Onshape. A second blog post from Dave Corcoran, Co-Founder and the Vice President of Research and Development at Onshape reveals some new faces among the development staff along with a remark about the company’s cloud centric approach.

I must admit being somewhat skeptical when I heard the new company was founded. After all, after being around the CAD business for more than 25 years, what could possibly be new? Yet I was still frustrated after these many years with some CAD software systems general fundamentals: the software was hard to use, PDM was a pain in the butt to use, the software was still too costly and often unreliable, all vendors still wanted to lock in their users and multi-CAD usage was rare, new releases became more and more difficult to install because existing data needed to be “migrated”, PDM’s big brother (PLM) promised the moon but seldom delivered without great expense and manpower, the benefits of cloud computing was relegated to special cases because the software was designed for interactive desktop computing.

Does Onshape solve all these BIG problems? I can’t divulge any details yet, but some are being directly addressed. You can get a few clues if you carefully read Dave’s blog; there you will find some hints about where Onshape is heading.

With all this recent activity my guess is that Onshape is getting ready for a public announcement.

More to follow.

What’s up with Belmont Technology?

September 9, 2013 By in 3D Design, CAD, New Technologies, PLM Industry Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

9 Sep 2013: Last week Siemens PLM Software announced that “Belmont Technology, a venture backed software start-up founded by CAD industry veterans, has licensed Siemens’ Parasolid® software and D-Cubed™ software components to be the foundation of a new generation of cloud-based applications for the computer-aided design, manufacturing and engineering (CAD/CAM/CAE) market. The Belmont team, which includes Founder and Chairman, Jon Hirschtick, and CEO John McEleney, will use Parasolid and D-Cubed components to provide the solid modeling and geometric constraint solving capabilities that are fundamental to modern CAD/CAM/CAE applications. Parasolid and D-Cubed components are developed by Siemens’ PLM software business unit.”

So that’s news. We have not heard from Belmont in some time. Note this verbiage: “a new generation of cloud-based applications for the computer-aided design, manufacturing and engineering (CAD/CAM/CAE) market.

As I recall, this mirrors the way SolidWorks started – a long time development followed by a brilliant piece of software, delivered at the right time and making the best use of existing and soon to be future computing technology. The company, in its early stages also was brilliantly managed and established new ways to market along with a close customer-vendor relationship. Today, SolidWorks – the company, for many reasons no longer has the many of these characteristics.

So, I am speculating about the possible new product. Perhaps my 20+ years in the CAD/CAM market allow me some perspective on what might be coming. Also, I think I have a pretty good understanding of what the sticking points are in existing products. So here goes:

  • Cloud based
  • Much easier to use
    • Model building guidance that encompasses user methodology
    • Speech recognition for commands
    • Automatic initiation of model veracity as you build
    • Real time collaboration with other designers
  • Automatic management of major topology changes
  • Fully integrated with PLM from the start
  • Easy upward migration from existing CAD systems and data formats
  • Built-in simulation and analysis software
  • Real time, full time shading and visualization
  • A flexible pricing structure
  • Combines both history and non-history based modeling
  • Easier use of vendor libraries
  • A new collaboration schema among internal and external designers
  • More flexible modeling allowing easier to redesign models
  • Incorporation of requirements at the early stages of design

Even if Belmont incorporated all of these, would it be enough to convince users to move or even migrate to a new system? After all, today’s CAD systems work and pretty much can design anything. Let’s take a quick look at the past.

What convinced new customers to migrate to SolidWorks at its introduction, was its new use of variable driven modeling and history based design. The logic was that if you correctly designed the model, than changing a few variables could change the resulting design, possibly resulting in a massive savings of design engineering. Many users bought into this, including me.

Unknown to us at the time, were the inherent drawbacks to such designs. The primary one being that this only worked for MINOR changes in the variables: one that caused few topology changes. There was no way to account for major topology changes without extensive programming, an undesirable way to manage the problem. Many confusing workarounds were built to significant CAD systems that are in use today.

Another problem was how to “unwind” the history and variables when changes are desired that cannot be handled parametrically. Thus, design re-use became only marginally workable. SpaceClaim solved this by totally eliminating design history, sacrificing much of its power, yet allowing users to manage deigns more easily.

Conclusions

Belmont Technology needs to hit a home run in making mechanical design engineering and re-design engineering better than today’s systems by orders of magnitudes.

Let’s see where we stand today with major mechanical CAD software:

  • Siemens PLM Software with NX, Solid Edge and Teamcenter.
  • Dassault Systemes with CATIA, SolidWorks and Enovia
  • PTC with Creo and Windchill
  • Autodesk with AutoCAD, Inventor and Autodesk PLM 360

Each has strong offerings and are large well funded companies with global sales and marketing, large well-funded development teams, and many customers. Can a newcomer easily overturn them? It has certainly been done in the past and certainly some are more vulnerable than others. All but Autodesk have made only limited accommodations for cloud based computing, while Autodesk has gone “whole hog.” Just today, Autodesk announced monthly pricing for its entire design suite, a big change from past pricing models.

IMHO, all of these vendors MAY be vulnerable to a fundamental change in technology. But it will have to be huge or promise to be huge, while at the same time require a unique difficult to copy technology.

I look forward to hearing more.

What are your thoughts?

Kenesto 2013 now focuses on Social Business Collaboration

January 28, 2013 By in 3D Design, CAD, Computer Industry, New Technologies, Social business collaboration Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

28 Jan 2013: Last week I had the opportunity to meet, via the web, with Stephen Bodnar and Maya Olsha-Yehiav of Kenesto, the startup featuring Mike Payne as CEO. Bodnar is Vice President, Products and Marketing; Maya Olsha-Yehiav is Director of Customer Success.

The topic under discussion was the announcement yesterday of what Kenesto calls their Unified Social Business Collaboration Platform, a substantial change from their former business strategy offering a cloud based workflow based system.

For some background information readers can review my two previous blogs about Kenesto.

Kenesto was formerly a cloud based workflow system. Here, from my previous “what is it” blog, is a description of what they formerly did. “Aimed at the category called business process automation, this cloud-based application allows asynchronous spawning of processes. Different from similar systems that try to model processes, Kenesto builds processes on the fly. Users wanting to track a process they are initiating, for instance an ECO, initiate a process, attach documents to it, and add users to the next process by adding their email addresses. Different types of “next processes” can be defined, such as “review and approve.” At each step in the process the recipient can add additional processes that add steps to the overall process. Kenesto builds the process diagram as steps are added. Note that this differs significantly from the BPM (Business Process Modeling) approach that models processes using a cumbersome programmatic approach. Kenesto calls it Business Process Automation (BPA).”

Kenesto 2013’s Kenesto Social Business Collaboration platform expands on their workflow system by adding extensive capabilities that vastly expands their offering by adding collaboration on documents, document storage sharing and control, team building and messaging collaboration among the team, and a text based team capture and audit trail. Users can also build multiple teams, and invite users to teams. Documents automatically link to related viewers and more than 200 are currently offered, including special extensions for viewing of Revit documents.

Pricing

Pricing has now changed from buying of bundles of processes to a more traditional user based pricing. This chart is taken directly from the Kenesto.com website.

Kenesto Pricing chart

Definitions of interest (from Wikepedia)

  • Social collaboration refers to processes that help multiple people interact, share information to achieve any common goal.
  • A social networking service is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on facilitating the building of social networks or social relations among people who, for example, share interests, activities, backgrounds, or real-life connections.

Conclusions

Bodnar described what they are doing as both social business and collaboration. For companies to realize social business they usually have to deploy 3 to 7 separate technologies. For example: specialty social business sites include: Yammer, Chatter, Socialtext, Nuage, file sharing sites like Dropbox, etc. Kenesto incorporates many of these into one.

While I am a CAD/PLM guy, not a social collaboration expert, I can see quite a few things in the Kenesto demo that seem really useful. You can organize teams, add people to it, add documents that can be shared, and record textual comments of the entire team. Of course, documents can be any type of document. Different than a doc sharing site such as Dropbox, you have limited control of access to the document, for instance, viewing only. Other elements can be added, such as workflow. Bodnar states that Kenesto is “**highly** complementary to the existing PDM/PLM tools.” It seems to me that this offers more ready access to design data than many PLM systems of today. While PLM systems are more rigid in document control, they are often very difficult to navigate. Perhaps there might be some middle ground by coupling the two systems.

In summary, different than many other social business sites, Kenesto provides multiple capabilities. It’s a cloud based, secure document sharing site, has team groups, document (including CAD) viewing for team members, task management, and a history audit trail of team communication.  Yet, the solution is a general solution applicable to many areas other than engineering and design.

Try it yourself by joining the free Kenesto Community at http://www.kenesto.com .

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SolidWorks founders start new company

November 1, 2012 By in 3D Design, CAD, New Technologies, Uncategorized Tags: , , , 11 Comments

11/01/12: You heard it first here! Earlier today I received a call from John McEleney, the former CEO of SolidWorks. John explained that he and five of the original founders of SolidWorks started a new company that will explore and develop solutions for the product development space. He shared with me that this includes: Jon Hirschtick, Dave Corcoran, Scott Harris, and Tommy Li.

Hirschtick, Harris, and Li were among the original founders of SoldWorks. McEleney joined a few years later. Corcoran led product development, while Harris was a key architect. In the early years, I was most impressed with the way the entire team was focused on a single perspective and all pulled together to accomplish their common goal. Since then I have seen many a company flounder, not because their product was flawed, but because the team was unable to work cohesively together.

McEleney further explained that the company has just been initiated today. They are obviously, in the super early stages of development. John would not discuss their products. He said they are still exploring many alternatives.

He went on to say that he was contacting many of the people in the CAD and product development space who will be able to promote the fact that their company was beginning its development. People like myself.

With a team like this, I don’t doubt that they can be successful. Hmmm, but what will they turn out? Keep tuned for further information.

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More confusion from Versata on think3

August 17, 2012 By in 3D Design, CAD, PLM Industry Tags: , , Leave a comment

I was just going through some of my old email, trying to cull out the old ones. I came across one from Austin Scee of Versata from early this year and wanted to see if anything was new. I found out that Scee is out as the former GM and a new GM (Shannon Willems) is managing what’s left of the acquisition, which ain’t much. The links on the think3.versata.com site don’t work and there seems no way to get info on the products.

I had the chance to speak with Willems earlier today, hoping that I could get some additional info on their plans and how the relationship with the Italian think3 organization is being resolved. Alas, I learned little that was new. To Willems’s credit he stated that “he and Versata were excited about the think3 software and that they were investing substantial resources in the product.” I repeatedly pressed Willems for more information about what substantial was, but could not get any details, other than that they had development firms in Boston, Russia and Italy working on the product.

If you go to think3.com it leads you to a page with lots of complex court filings, with no reference to Versata or their website. No real surprise here since Versata did not acquire think3, just the intellectual property (IP)- the think3 software. One look at the Versata website at think3.versata.com leads me to believe that Versata is putting as little resource into the acquisition as possible. Clicking on the products page reveals not one link to another page for more info. What could be more revealing about their intent?

Versata think3 product page has NO links

Willems indicated that there is still revenue being derived from maintenance from existing customers. The US courts seem have decided that Versata owns the worldwide IP for the products. But, the Bologna, Italy courts seem to have made a similar decision for the Italian company. Customers can get the software from either company except where local legal decisions have been made supporting Versata’s claim, notably Japan and Dubai. Even then policing installations seems virtually impossible.

My conclusion is that Versata continues to provide minimal support and virtually no product enhancements for think3. The legal machinations continue to be fought around the world, apparently aimed at Versata preventing the Italian organization from gaining revenue.

On the other hand, the Italian site appears operational and moving ahead.

In addition, there were many LinkedIn contacts showing think3 as their active company, mostly from India and Italy.

My first choice as a customer would be to abandon this mess and go with other well-supported software. Lacking that choice, I would choose to do business with the think3 provider that is most open about the product and its future.

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Dell announces new Precision Mobile workstations

July 24, 2012 By in 3D Design, CAD, New Technologies Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

24 July 2012: I was pre-briefed last Friday about Dell’s new mobile workstations. Today I am in the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia writing this blog, taking time from all this natural beauty to keep you informed about the latest technology.

Today Dell is announcing the newest entries into its Precision line of workstations – the M4700 and the M6700 mobile workstations.

While these are hardly your ordinary laptops, weighing in at about 8 pounds, they offer a high degree of portability and an awesome display of computing power, incredible graphics options, high speed memory up to 16 GB or 32 GB depending on memory speed, disk capacities of up to 3.2 terabytes, and all this with a 10 hour battery life. Nevertheless, it’s better than lugging a desktop workstation and an external display to your next meeting. This is truly a machine that I would be comfortable to use as both my desktop workstation AND and mobile workstation.

They are not cheap. Starting prices range from $1649 for the Dell Precision M4700, to $2199 for the M6700, and $3579 for the M6700 Covet. Fully decked out I could easily imagine them coming in at 100% to 150% above their base price.

Why the covet name I asked? Mano Gialusis, Dell’s Sr. Product Manager, replied that after seeing the Gorilla Glass and edge to edge display, all users will covet it!

Last year TechniCom had the opportunity to benchmark software using the M6600 and that delivered excellent performance on Autodesk Inventor and SolidWorks. While Dell was not able provide any specifics on the performance of the latest workstations, I estimate that the M6700 with the extreme I7 processor and the higher performance graphics cards should deliver from 2X to 5X the overall performance on compute intensive operations. The overall performance that users will see, naturally will depend on the specific applications being run.

A bit about the graphics options. The AMD card is new and these workstations are the first to have it. The specs are available on the Dell website. This card offers HD3D stereoscopic viewing. NVIDIA offers three cards, offering their Quadro GPU technology, 3D vision and power conservation techniques. See more details at http://www.dell.com/precision .

Dell was not able to use Intel Xeon processors because they are too big and power hungry for mobile workstations. Instead the Intel Core i7-Extreme Edition Processor provides outstanding features, such as: four 3.33 GHz cores for better multitasking and multithreaded performance, 8 MB of smart cache, an Integrated memory controller delivering high memory bandwidth, and a new Quick Path Interconnect for fast data transfer between the processor and chipset.

Conclusions:
I am very impressed with Dell’s attention to the high end engineering and graphics markets. The previous announcement a few months ago of their desk-side systems show that they understand these market needs by offering well balanced compute speeds, amazing graphics, monstrous expandability, serviceability, and reliability. These mobile workstations expand on those offerings.

These babies are hot! If you need high end, portable workstations that are truly super-computers, there is no better way to go.

http://www.dell.com/precision

Disclosure: I received no compensation for this review. All opinions are mine.
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My Twitter feed at PlanetPTC Live 2012 expanded with additional comments

June 7, 2012 By in 3D Design, CAD, Digital Prototyping, Manufacturing industry, PLM Industry Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

7 Jun 2012

Introduction

I attended PlanetPTC Live 2012 as a media and analyst guest of PTC earlier this week. I was free to mingle with any user in attendance, and attend the general sessions, as were the other 75 or so media representatives. PTC also organized special sessions for the media. These sessions generally were more concise and allowed more direct interaction with PTC executives, other management and selected presenters. [Disclosure: PTC paid for my airfare and hotel accommodations.]

I tweeted during the events I attended, not prolifically as do some other tweeters, instead choosing to focus on what I found to be interesting and the highlights of some sessions. I have taken most these tweets and expanded on them below for my blog readers. In a blog to be posted soon, I might add additional comments.

In general, the conference was upbeat and well organized. With Creo and Windchill almost evenly divided in terms of revenue, the two lines of business account for some 80% of PTC revenue. The other three (ALM, SCM, and SLM) make up the balance, but represent substantial future growth areas for PTC. All three are collaborative businesses based on Windchill. SLM being the newest. With the PTC business now focused on lines of business, each with its own P&L, customers are better represented.

Tweets expanded (tweets are identified by the • symbol, followed by an expanded explanation)

  • In the exec wrap up on Tuesday, Brian Shepherd confirmed plans for an entry level Windchill. Pre-configured for smaller users.

More: While I had not heard of such an activity, some media were and asked the status of the project. As best I can recollect, this may come out in 2013. Probably one reason why Windchill ProductPoint was decommissioned last year. Remember this product, which relied on Microsoft SharePoint?

  • PTC realigns organization structure by lines of business, each with P&L responsibility. CAD, PLM, ALM, SCM, and SLM.
  • SLM is service lifecycle management. According to EVP Barry Cohen, an underserved market.
  • Mike Campbell now heading up MCAD segment. Brian Shepherd and Bill Berutti head up other 4. Development reports to EVP Rob Gremley.

More: Here are the relevant descriptions from the latest PTC company info flyer:

Rob Gremley EVP, Product Development & Corporate Marketing
Brian Shepherd EVP, PLM & SCM Segments
Bill Berutti EVP, ALM & SLM Segments
Mike Campbell Division General Manager, MCAD Segment

  • Problems reconciling EBOMs and MBOMs? Now there’s another – SBOMs. Service BOMs add parts kitting.

More: Users have struggled with developing and managing manufacturing BOMs for decades. Add a new one for managing the services practices – the Service BOM, which describes the product from a service point of view. These often contain groups of parts that may be replaced as one unit in the field.

It looks like Windchill MPMLink today manages this process for MBOMs and EBOMs in those companies that use Windchill and Creo. With PTC constructing a Service Lifecycle Management business unit, I am not sure where or how the SBOM relates to the other BOMs and how it is managed. I am sure PTC has thought this out and can provide an answer.

  • Campbell highlights Creo Layout and Freestyle as providing impetus for move to Creo.

More: These two Creo apps are new for Creo 2. Both are targeted towards giving users more easy to use modeling methods, fully integrated with Creo Parametrics. In the case of these two apps, both also play in the concept design space. PTC stressed the connection into Creo, rather that having a stand-alone concept design system, a dig I am sure meant to rattle the cage of companies using Alias (from Autodesk), today’s most widely application for industrial and concept design.

  •  PTC positions Creo 2 as opening the floodgates for Wildfire transitions. No cost to users. UI and functions better.

More: Brian Shepherd said this on the first day in the main tent session. For those of you not aware of what the term main tent is, it relates back to my days at IBM, where they called the main tent was where all the attendees were gathered together, as opposed to the breakout sessions. I guess back in the early days IBM held these sessions under tents – companies were smaller then.

  •  With release of Creo 2, PTC encouraging third parties to develop [apps]. None available from third parties yet. Opportunity to fully integrate.

More: In a follow up conversation with Brian Thompson, VP of Product Management for Creo, he stated that the requisite API’s are not fully available yet. They will be by Creo 3 and Creo 4. Creo 4, I asked! Yes, he said by Creo 4, or two years from now. Third party developers might want to clarify this directly with PTC.

  • Option modeling another approach to developing ETO configurations. Another approach to developing requirements based models?
  •  Option modeling marries Creo 2 and Windchill 10.1. Can add PLM config options based on geometric positioning.

More: Option modeling allows a concise description of a product with many variants. In some systems users plug all the variants into a parametric model containing all of the variant options. This often results in a very large model with an obscure definition of when each variant is used. Creo 2 and Windchill aim to solve this by combining the geometric properties of Creo with the data management properties of Windchill. For example, in a bicycle, all wheels are attached to hubs. Thus one need only keep track of the different wheels, along with any geometric modifications to the geometric model for the various wheels. Filters and equations are used for the definitions. I think, because I only saw a five minute video example.

  • Attending Cummins case study of integrating mfg and product intros. Closing the loop between the two.

More: Dr. Michael Grieves, author of several books on PLM, along with Apriso, revealed a startling efficiency claim for Cummins, which integrated its PLM, ERP, and MES systems. See if you can get a copy of his slides for an explanation.

  • Main tent sessions focused on Creo 2.0 and hints of what’s to come. Main business line highlighted. Campbell: great job on CAD.

More: On the first day PTC revealed what’s new with upcoming products and it vision for the future, near term.

  • Chief customer officer – Mark Hodges. Never heard of that title.

More: From Wikipedia I found out that a chief customer officer (CCO) is defined as “an executive who provides the comprehensive and authoritative view of the customer and creates corporate and customer strategy at the highest levels of the company to maximize customer acquisition, retention, and profitability.” The CCO typically reports to the chief executive officer, and is potentially a member of the board of directors.

  • High of 97 degs expected today at PlanetPTC in Orlando. Hot AND humid. Good to be inside with A/C all day.

More: Guess someone got a good discount for holding it here this time of the year.

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Dell’s new line of Precision Workstations rival supercomputers

April 23, 2012 By in 3D Design, CAD, New Technologies Tags: , , , Leave a comment

23 April 2012: Last week I attended the Dell Precision Workstation announcement in San Francisco for their new line of Precision workstations meant for professionals with a need for high amounts of computation. Under embargo until today, I am now free to explore the details of the announcement with you.

If any of you were paying attention to my tweets of last week you may have seen my expectations for this line, even before I knew what the details were. I posited that the new products, following a long tradition of hardware announcements, we’re going to be faster, more expandable, and a better price performer. All of that is true, along with some other characteristics:

  • More green
  • Quieter – 8 thermal sensors in chassis control 8 fans.
  • Reliable memory technology – alerts user to replace defective DIMM’s
  • Smaller packaging
  • Easier to work on
  • Rack mountable
  • Can store up to 8 hard drives internally
  • Processor choice: multi socket or single socket (1 or 2 Xeon E5-2600 processors); each with up to 8 cores
  • Max memory up to 512 GB
  • Offers many times the performance for about the same cost

The four new systems T7600, T5600, T3600, and the T1560 all use the last Intel Xeon processors, and support both NVIDIA graphics cards along with NVIDIA’s Tesla boards with their amazing graphic CPU’s.

Maximum expandability is enormous and will form the basic choice of which system users will buy. By now the Dell website is updated with the specs. Go to www.dell.com for the details. The Intel spokesman stated that the T7600 is faster than the fastest supercomputer of only six years ago. Absolutely incredible!

I spent a fair amount of time at dinner the night before the meeting speaking with the industrial designers, who were very excited about the design, particularly the packaging and the ease with which users can access and upgrade the internals. On the T7600 and the T5600, the motherboard is now positioned away from the chassis so that the power cabling is all on one side and the electronic connections are on the other. Very nice. The entire power supply is an isolated unit that plugs directly into the chassis, thus it can swap out in seconds. A far cry from having to mess with the power plugs, as in the past.

Dell T7600 interior with dual processors

Note that no power cables are on this side of the motherboard, which is now more towards the middle of the chassis.

Here is a look at the removable power supply, accessible from the rear of the unit.

Removable power supply

Here is what the new towers look like (the ones on the left).

The Dell Precision T1650, T3600, T5600 and T7600 (left to right in the above image)

I generally don’t cover hardware announcements, but I made the exception in this case because these workstations are clearly aimed at the engineering and rendering/animation markets. The Dell Precision T1650, T3600, T5600 and T7600 (left to right in the above image) workstations will be available for purchase worldwide starting in May.

  • The Dell Precision T7600 pricing starts at $2,149 USD
  • The Dell Precision T5600 pricing starts at $1,879 USD
  • The Dell Precision T3600 pricing starts at $1,099 USD
  • The Dell Precision T1650 pricing will be announced in May

I expect that the T7600 reasonably configured will be in the $4000 range and could go much higher by adding up to three Nvidia boards (Quadro plus up to 2 Tesla GPU boards) that are now possible with its 600 watt power supply and high speed bus access directly to the Xeon processors. Nvidia’s GPU boards, called Tesla boards contain up to 448 cores. You can find out more at http://www.nvidia.com/object/personal-supercomputing.html.

Using the full capacity of the multi-core systems requires that the software be optimized for multi-processor architecture. In conversations with Nvidia representatives, they said that programs with have tight loops, and high compute requirements while processing minimal amounts of data are ideal candidates. FEA solvers and renderers are ideal for multi-threading. By the way, if you had a chance to see the movie Hugo, a huge part was rendered. I can hardly imagine the compute cycles required.

Takeaways:

If you are a power user, this is the way to go: truly super-computer performance delivered for workstation prices.

I tried very hard to get metrics on speed comparisons, but Dell (rightly so) claimed that it was so specific to the job being run, that they were unwilling to discuss numbers. With all of the standard benchmarks out there I am a little surprised. If any of my readers want to make available their experiences on the performance side I will be happy to publish meaningful results.

While I am a Mac fan, I have several PC workstations on site. I am salivating at the chance to get my hands on a properly equipped T7600. I expect many of you are as well.

I hope the software vendors will soon expand their capabilities to match this hardware power available. For you software vendors reading this, here are some things to think about:

  • More industry specific software that needs minimal information to produce designs.
  • Fully integrated analysis during design (like spell checkers)
  • Turning well specified requirements into designs
  • Better graphical PLM systems, with full automatic selection and rendering starting at even the most complex products
  • Allowing users to work totally with 3D stereoscopic models
  • And so on . . .

 

Disclosure: Dell paid for my travel expenses to and from the meeting and hotel accommodations and meals in San Francisco.

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