Dezignstuff SolidWorks Blog

If you have an opinion about SolidWorks in the cloud, this is the time to discuss it. SolidWorks is in the process of forming their strategy of how to deploy, license, support, etc., and it may mean big changes to some areas of the business as it touches users. Really, SW is looking for input from various places, and your voice needs to be heard.

This blog will host part of the discussion, although not in a formally sanctioned way. The stuff you write here is read by SW. SW employees keep telling me that SW Corp takes this blog more seriously than I take it. For once, we can use that fact to our advantage rather than my disadvantage.

I think we need to take advantage of this time to help important topics filter to the top. We all understand there are a lot of concerns, and some of the concerns are obvious. We all understand there are some advantages as well. From the chatter around here, it seems that SolidWorks is looking for some sort of “devil’s advocate” type input – some of the critical analysis that I have said seems to be missing from most SW development projects. So NOW is the time.

So. I just want to restate a few things in bullet form:

• “cloud” is being loosely taken to mean a combination of server-client installation and distributed computing
• distributed computing means using multiple machines to solve big datasets or individual complex computations
• this could possibly include local clouds, meaning behind your company’s firewall
• it most certainly means a hosted cloud on some third party server farm
• cloud can reduce your reliance on local IT and hardware
• cloud will require more load on your network infrastructure
• I doubt strongly that this is going to mean any sort of reduction of real cost
• cloud can allow software use on anything that access the web or network (mac, linux, unix, pc, etc.)
• cloud brings up an entire new range of licensing issues, along with data ownership

Again, now is the time to make the most of your input.

Deelip has been at SWW10 this week, and I just ran into him today. Here are Deelip and John Picinich. Deelip writes a blog and John is a highly respected SolidWorks reseller, friend, and commenter on this blog when the topic warrants. SolidWorks World is really about meeting people like this that mostly just get to interact on the web.

Anyway, the point of this blog post is that Deelip took a picture of a computer screen showing SolidWorks running in one of these “cloud” configurations, meaning across a network, on a Mac or on a netbook, and the SolidWorks program showed SolidWorks V6 on it.

This image is from Deelip’s blog, and you should go over there to read his interviews with Jeff Ray and Shaun Murphy. Jeff Ray’s comments were fairly predictable, but Shaun took the rather extraordinary route of admitting the obvious, which of course no one expects.

Anyway, back to the picture. This likely means that the software running on the “cloud” is SolidWorks using the Catia V6 kernel, which has been a big topic of speculation on this and other blogs. One of the top 5 search phrases for folks landing on this site is “catia v6″, so people are out there looking for information on V6. Remember that the Catia V6 kernel is the one that has a lot of direct edit capabilities, among other things.

There is more to say here, but I’ve got to go for now. This mornings session starts soon with the new features to be delivered in 2011.

Talk amongst yourselves.