Dezignstuff SolidWorks Blog

Ok, I’ve been talking with all sorts of people about the potential implications of the “cloud” announcement. Since we don’t really have anything firm, the only thing to do is to speculate.

I think what SolidWorks announced on Monday may have been the victim of incredibly bad communication. I think the word “cloud” may have been used rather injudiciously. I don’t really know this for a fact. If it were a fact, someone else would report it and I might be uninterested at that point.

What if… what if SolidWorks really didn’t mean “cloud” when it said “cloud”. What if it really meant a much older technique of simply giving a user the ability to install the software on one computer (call it a server or a bob or whatever) and run it from another computer (say maybe something called a terminal with a thin client).

Well, that’s not nearly so scary as hosting your company’s IP data on a Google server, is it? That means you install on your server, and run on your own computer with or without appropriate hardware, OS or whatever.

Ok, there are some savvy people out there who may have been around for a while. You may remember that back in ’97 or ’98, SolidWorks actually had something that may have been called a “network install” (not 100% on the name) which was very different from what we think of as a network license today. In fact, it was just what I described above – one computer runs the software and the user sits on another computer. So if this is what SolidWorks means by the word “cloud”, then it is just a case of a bad choice of words, and also not nearly as scary as some believe, and beyond that, possibly even a good thing in terms of accessibility.

Of course it would shoot to hell the theory that “cloud” operation reduces IT overhead.

There have been two versions floating around of what actually happened on the stage demo of the “cloud”. One was that the Amazon server farm was actually used. Another is that the cloud was a computer behind the stage. I tend to think that the Amazon farm was used for development, but the demo performance was that local cloud computer behind the stage. All of this is of course conjecture, but at this point I think it’s conjecture with some basis.

So, the word “cloud” has come to be a bit emotionally charged, and while it may still be technically descriptive, I think it at least gives an incomplete view of what we should expect.

1)  I do believe that SolidWorks will offer some sort of cloud software-as-a-service option where a bank of servers are contracted from a large and pre-existing provider such as Amazon. I think some users will find this convenient, but far more are terrified of being forced into this model, but I doubt we will be forced into it in the next 10-15 years. I think initially this will be an option. It is great for distributed computing (using a lot of computers to work on big FEA or rendering jobs), and for people to do demonstrations, basically taking a lot of horsepower to where ever you can find a computer connected to the internet with great bandwidth. Oh, and when someone doesn’t mind their data being stored in some location where someone working at the cloud facility could randomly or specifically misappropriate data. This is not paranoia, this is anticipating crime, which happens all the time.

2)  I really hope that beyond that, SolidWorks provides users with the ability to create their own cloud, which basically means resurrecting the server-client network installation from 12 or so years ago.

I think these two paragraphs sum up the possibilities. 1) is the stuff most of us don’t want to see, but is the sexy dotcom bubble type hype that software vendors are eager to show. 2) is the type of thing that will be useful to a lot of companies, but for reasons that are different from 1).

Again, I can’t cite references to back this up. Some of it is simply hope that SolidWorks has thought about the possibilities and done something reasonable.

Comments?