A changing climate for CAD

NASA Tech Briefs, Mar 2002

McEleney believes that when saving costs, companies need to look at how much they already have invested in a CAD system, and what they need to do with it. "In the large-scale enterprises," McEleney said, "they're not going to switch to a lower-cost alternative, because CAD costs are a small fraction of what the overall costs are."

PTC now offers the lowest-cost alternative - free downloadable software. Last month, the company introduced Pro/DESKTOP Express, a parametric, associative solid modeling program built on the same kernel as Pro/ENGINEER. According to Shepherd, the reasons for offering the free software were simple. "If you're a Pro/ENGINEER customer today, but you want to do business with a supplier who doesn't use Pro/E, that customer had a few-- thousand-dollar barrier to get over to buy Pro/E. What if the person who doesn't use Pro/E could download an application for free from PTC.com that read in the Pro/E data because it's based on the same kernel?" The value proposition PTC is offering, said Shepherd, is that Pro/DESKTOP Express is a full-featured CAD system. "It's part of our game-changing strategy," he added. "In our industry, we're looking to turn things upside down."

The Migration Continues

One of the issues facing CAD companies today also was a primary focus a year ago. Will 2D to 3D migration continue, and does widespread adoption of 3D CAD tools need to happen? This issue divided our experts more than any other aspect of the CAD market.

"In today's world, everybody already has a system. No one is starting with a drafting board and pencil anymore," said Kross. "We have a very large focus on 3D with Autodesk Inventor. Our objective is to shift our entire installed base to 3D." To that end, Autodesk has announced the Autodesk Inventor Series, which incorporates both 2D and 3D products - Autodesk Mechanical Desktop 6, based on AutoCAD, and Autodesk Inventor 5.3 3D design software. The new combined product allows users of AutoCAD, AutoCAD Mechanical, and Autodesk Mechanical Desktop to keep using their products while they get started with 3D by using Autodesk Inventor.

"Our customers get the advantage of keeping what they're using today, plus the new capability of a much easier to use product. Some customers will go gradually from 2D to 3D, but I hope we make it so easy for them, that they just say, `I'm going to do this,'" said Kross.

"We see companies moving from 2D to 3D every day," said Rogers. "When you move to a 3D environment, you can immediately do things in maybe one step that used to take you five in a 2D environment, so you see immediate benefits." IBM offers the CATIA Companion, which allows companies to move into 3D without being intimidated. Rogers explained that CATIA Companion sits on the same workstation as CATIA. "When there is a specific topic on which you have a question when working in CATIA, you can enter into the Companion product, and it steps you through what you're trying to do in 3D."

According to Fischer, VX chose not to support either 2D or 31), but to offer both. "In some circumstances, creating a quick drawing in 2D is sufficient. You can either work in the world of 3D or do it quick and dirty and get it done without style," he added. "Many 2D users don't ever have to use 3D. But if it needs to be part of an assembly, that must be created in 3D and exist as a digital model."