Onshape begins the dance of the seven veils
The Takeaway
CAD start-up Onshape is slowly emerging from its cone of silence to talk in broad terms about its new CAD technology.
The details
For almost two years Onshape has been the talk of the CAD industry, ever since co-founder Jon Hirschtick assembled a team of software all-stars and started talking how “CAD isn’t completely solved.” If anybody has a good insight into what remains undone in CAD, it should be Hirschtick. As co-founder of SolidWorks, he led the development of a software line that redefined an industry and remains the standard in mechanical design 20 years later.
“Salome, Dance of the Seven Veils” by Lubomir Korenko. It was too embarrassing for us to illustrate this article with the more realistic depictions of the famed dance. (Source: http://www.absolutearts.com/)
For months the only public webpage at Onshape.com was a “coming soon” notice with a form to provide a way to get on the company mailing list. Last week the walls started coming down, with a blog post from Hirschtick entitled “Why We Started From Scratch (Again) in the CAD Business.” In the post, Hirschtick gave five reasons why he started Onshape; to summarize his comments:
Jon Hirschtick, co-founder and chairman, Onshape.
“The design world has changed:” Traditional CAD was never built for distributed teams.
“The computing world has changed:” Cloud, web, and mobile technologies “are our exciting new raw materials” for creating CAD.
“I feel an obligation to my customers:” “I’m an engineer too … I feel a strong connection to the countless designers and engineers who have bought CAD systems that I’ve helped build.”
“Nobody else is meeting the challenge:” “You cannot fully take advantage of the latest cloud, web, and mobile technologies unless you architect your CAD system from scratch.”
“I want to make CAD fun again:” Users talk less about cool designs and more about “the hassles of sharing files and using different versions of CAD, the prohibitive cost of software licenses, and the challenges of PDM. Sigh.”
The blog post is a nice insight into the thoughts of a well-liked, well-respected industry veteran. But reading between the lines in this post (and a second one posted today from Onshape co-founder and VP of Research and Development Dave Corcoran) reveals several hints about the nature of their new product. In no particular order, these hints include:
Cloud-native CAD: “We were aiming to create the world’s first and only cloud-native production CAD system with a fundamentally different architecture that has never existed before.” (Corcoran)
Interactive production CAD: “Onshape is a very interactive production CAD modeling experience where most of the work is done in the cloud, but feels instantaneous when you’re drawing sketches or resizing fillets.” (Corcoran)
Dave Corcoran, VP of R&D, Onshape
Performance breakthroughs: “CPU clock speed is no longer increasing—it has hit a wall. But cloud performance and Internet performance are rapidly improving.” (Hirschtick)
Mobile capabilities: “Younger people have grown up in a post-desktop world and have different expectations about computers. … They expect computing to be modern and available anywhere, anytime on any device.” (Hirschtick)
Automated file management: “I’ve also dreamed of eliminating the everyday hassles of traditional CAD. I just love the idea of not having to install software and never having to worry about backing up my stuff.” (Hirschtick)
We also know the new software uses Parasolid as its 3D solids modeling kernel; Siemens PLM announced it last year. The same 3D kernel used in industry leader SolidWorks, by the way.
These may be only broad strokes on the canvas, but the picture is beginning to emerge of a next-generation 3D CAD product. By March or April we should know for sure exactly what the next CAD challenger looks like.