Tony Affuso’s Keynote
Tony Affuso is the leader of UGS – Siemens PLM. Very much a fixture and figure in the industry. So when he had something to say about SolidWorks’ foray into the cloud, I certainly sat up and listened.
When Mr. Affuso was talking, I didn’t get the sense that he was trying to get a bunch of teen agers riled up. I never got the sense that he was playing a cheerleader role. He seemed much more like a guy who was concerned about the technical capabilities of the product his company was producing. He didn’t strike me as someone who was mainly interested in managing a company, and details of how the software worked filtered up to him sporadically, he seems involved. This is all just an off-the-cuff impression, but it was a good impression. The fact that he has some association with Rochester, NY, having studied at UofR and it sounds like he owns a home in the Finger Lakes, so he gains some points there as well.
One of the things that interested me was that he said Solid Edge has enjoyed a 50% growth over last year, and that this was in part attributed to SolidWorks users fears about interoperability (with the threat of a kernel transplant from Parasolid to Catia V6), and security and ownership (cad in the cloud). I would also attribute it to the coinciding facts that Solid Edge finally put together a product that’s hard to argue with, and they started making a concerted effort to reach out to existing and potential users.
Tony was not cynical as he described Mr. Ray’s attempt to explain what he meant by “I want to kill SolidWorks”, he was factual, and relayed the story without even a smirk. But at the same time you could tell he wished Ray would be around a little longer to experiment with the SolidWorks customer base.
He also showed several slides of recent software evaluations where Siemens PLM is definitely getting the best of Dassault in some of the biggest companies in the world. I will try to get some video of his speech, because anyone who has participated in the discussion about CAD in the Cloud has certainly been heard. Maybe not by the the CAD company you hoped was listening, but certainly by this Siemens PLM.
On the other side of the issue, there has been a lot of talk about the cloud here. Siemens is not ignoring the cloud, in fact, after chiding Ray for chasing SW customers toward SE, Affuso said “we like the cloud”. Here’s the thing. After seeing some presentations on what the NX customer does, they are mostly from international organizations with distributed engineering and other product development efforts sharing work from large geographical separation. Cloud makes sense for huge conglomerates sharing data from many sources. In fact, a whole lot of things make sense when seen from a full-on PLM point of view that people like me who develop products in a closet tend to not understand. So if nothing else, I’m getting some perspective from this conference.
There is a huge difference between the markets for NX/Catia and SE/SW. Solid Edge and SolidWorks are small components used in smaller businesses on smaller products. We don’t need and can’t afford full blown PLM. We don’t need global enterprise collaboration suites because most of us don’t do that, or don’t do it on a constant volume.
So if Dassault had the idea that SolidWorks was going to play in the cloud with the big boys, I think the notion was misguided. Notice no one else is rushing to announce other CAD in the cloud initiatives. Even the presenter from Microsoft said “the cloud is happening – just not as fast as we originally thought”. I think there will wind up being a lot of peripherals in the cloud, but mid-range cad in the cloud isn’t where I would place my bets just now.