It’s a sleepy Tuesday morning in Atlanta. Siemens PLM and Solid Edge welcome us to the latest iteration of Solid Edge University, etcetera etcetera etcetera. Just as we’re settling in for some serious corporate presentations, in zooms a guy on a go-kart — but it’s not a go-kart. It spins, does tricks, backs up, goes forward, glides. He scoots from the back of the hall to the front, hops off and lifts the cart onto the state. Definitely not how most speakers get up there. SEU 2014 is going to be interesting!
Ali Kermani, inventor of the Crazy Cart and VP of Digital Media, Razor USA, told a rapt audience how he had this awesome idea for a follow-on product for Razor’s kick scooters but couldn’t get his management to listen. So he left Razor and went to business school to learn how to take his idea to market. He continued to work on the design and came up with not only a great product but truly creative ways to overcome obstacles like not getting funding (approach other investors, Razor finds out and funds it), not getting face time at a major toy show to showcase the Crazy Cart (so cull a buying VP out of the herd and let him try it in the basement), no ad budget (create a series of very cool YouTube videos to make the product go viral before it’s even available) … It was a great story that every single person in the audience could take back, draw inspiration from and use to deal with the inevitable roadblocks thrown up in getting anything to market.
Solid Edge’s Dan Staples, VP, Mainstream Engineering, is a fan favorite but had a tough act to follow. Mr. Staples revved up the audience with a long list of what’s coming in ST 7. He told us that there are over 1300 user-requested enhancements in the release, many of which are intended to boost productivity. There was whooping and hollering, especially for the sheet metal options; 3D sketching environment; measurement tools that stay on screen; new 3D sketching tools; enhancements to the materials definition database; improved performance for large assemblies; faster placement of dimensions and call-outs, and more. But the most audience response came when the ST7 team showed the new hole creation tools. In the new release, the hole and its threads are created from the fastener rather than the other way around. For more on the 1300-odd enhancements, check out the ST7 Fact Sheet.
The other big news of the event was the wider availability of the Solid Edge online store, and its Solid Edge subscription offering. I hosted a panel discussion that showed most users were cool with the idea of an online store and monthly renewals. The panel, two entrepreneurs, Siemens’ Bill McClure and a reseller, fielded questions about how the subscription process works and what buyers can expect. The Solid Edge you buy via subscription is exactly the same as what you would buy under a traditional perpetual license with maintenance. A couple of interesting points came up: Watch out if you travel with your license because the store isn’t yet available globally. One panelist, David Hutton of FlexiPump, travels between the UK and Africa and discovered that a license that expires in the UK can’t be renewed in Africa. Mr. Hutton also discovered that he works differently with the subscriptions. He groups his work in the periods when his license is active to avoid having a license running when he’s too busy doing other things to use it. Some months, he has a license; others, he doesn’t. The biggest concerns about subscriptions were raised by a Solid Edge reseller; he’s worried that he’ll spend significant time with a customer only to have him buy a subscription. Panelist Madison Rye of Ally PLM said that Ally has so far seen subscribers who are incremental new users and that the majority of customers still prefer more traditional purchases.
Mr. Hutton’s FlexiPump is another great story from SEU14. It’s a simple, hand-operated pump that enables farmers to easily and cheaply irrigate their fields. Mr. Hutton started using Solid Edge in university in the UK but needed to keep evolving his design after he no longer had access to the educational edition. Enter subscriptions as a cost-effective way for him to produce professional-caliber designs for working with production facilities in Italy and elsewhere. Mr. Hutton is intent on building a profitable company that makes FlexiPump available in Africa at a price affordable to a non-governmental organization or to the farmers directly. Other pumps sold (or donated) in the region are mechanical and require machined replacement parts; FlexiPump is plastic and anything likely to wear out is easily replaced. Mr. Hutton is continuing to work with farmers to test out the latest iteration of the pump for durability, pricing, distribution and repair. He’s looking into starting a Kickstarter or other campaign to help fund production and we’ll post a link once we have it.
A quick update from Solid Edge’s VP and General Manager, Karsten Newbury: there are now over 500,000 cumulative seats of Solid Edge sold, and an additional 300,000 online registrations for the free Solid Edge student edition. I’m working to get comparables so that we can gauge growth, but it’s clear that the Solid Edge community is far larger than most of us realized.
Mr. Newbury also made a couple of high-profile announcements during his keynote. First, a Solid Edge/Femap app store that goes live later this year with apps from Zuken for eCAD and mechatronics, to KeyShot, to Kenesto for cloud-based engineering collaboration to Cadenas’ parts catalog. Mr. Newbury said that growing this technology ecosystem is an important priority, and that he expects the apps to be “deep functionality add-ons for our products that enable users to design and simulate better.” In all, Siemens says there will be over 500 Solid Edge apps available in the app store.
Finally, GrabCAD. You’ve heard of that, right? It’s a CAD-specific cloud-based file sharing and collaboration site, with over 1 million engineering and design users. At SEU, Siemens announced that GrabCAD is licensing Parasolid, the CAD kernel that drives Solid Edge, NX, SolidWorks, Vectorworks, a number of CAM solutions and most of the major analysis platforms. GrabCAD CEO Hardi Meybaum said that Parasolid will be the underpinning of GrabCAD Workbench, the company’s collaboration engine. Queue wild speculation. In a blog post after SEU, GrabCAD’s Rob Stevens asked everyone to
Calm down. We’re not building a CAD system. [GrabCAD] Workbench already has one of the best CAD viewers on the market. The viewer lets non-CAD users see your models in 3D as well as explode, section view, measure, compare versions, markup models and more. We want to go even further in making it easy to interrogate, measure, and interact with models, which is why we’re working with Parasolid.
Why announce this at SEU? Because Mr. Meybaum was a Solid Edge user at one point, and because GrabCAD’s goal is to enable a distributed design team, which might just be using Solid Edge.
The polo-wearing Solid Edge team is trying hard to carve out a separate identity from the starched shirts of Siemens PLM and the dark suits of Siemens AG. It’s a tough go because the AG has such tight control over everything that’s externally facing, from website design to marketing documents; internally, it seems as though the Solid Edge team is free to draw on the resources of the greater AG but isn’t constrained by them, technologically. Solid Edge is, according to its users, a great product that not many people have heard of. For nearly 20 years Solid Edge has been overshadowed by other products owned by its corporate parents — perhaps it’s finally starting to come into its own.
Images courtesy of Siemens PLM Softare, Razor USA and FlexiPump.
Note: Siemens PLM graciously covered some of the expenses associated with my participation at the event but did not in any way influence the content of this post.
