Solid Edge 2023 What’s New: Philosophy

This What’s New is going to have to be treated as a multi-part post. There’s just too much to cover all at once. The biggest news of what’s new in Solid Edge 2023 is a bit philosophical. Let’s start with the obvious. The Solid Edge 2023 application logo has changed. To me, this change signifies that Solid Edge as a part of Siemens Digital Industries Software is more a part of the big corporate entity and less a free-wheeling hippie step-child. That’s something you’ll see right away, but it also not-so-subtly leans in to a bit of a philosophical shift.

Stating the obvious that no one wants to talk about is kind of my thing. Corporate types are generally above stating the obvious, but they don’t seem to understand that skipping important facts leads to a lot of misunderstanding. People have to guess what’s going on, and that never goes in the right direction. You’re much better off just being explicit. Even about bad news. You could talk about the color of the sky all day without saying the word blue, and I’m sure you’d look very erudite, but you’d also confuse the hell out of the commoners.

I’m sorry to take space to do this in a What’s New post. What’s New is my favorite time of the year, and one of the few types of writing that makes me sparkle. But I think you’re not going to understand anything that comes after unless I take this time up front to talk about What’s New in Siemens CAD philosophy – and that’s Xcelerator. Not that I fully understand it. I’ve talked to several people about it, and still just feel like I have a fuzzy hint of what it’s all about.

You’ve been hearing the word Xcelerator a lot. I’ve even had to add it to my spell check dictionary. In Siemens speak, Xcelerator is Siemens open digital business platform intended to accelerate digital transformation. And digital transformation is the process of converting paper or analog data or processes to digital. For us, engineers and designers, it has specific significance related to design, but for Siemens as a whole, the idea includes facilities, transportation, IoT and cloud, along with manufacturing.

Yes, I did use the word platform. I believe that Siemens’ implementation of “the platform” is different from other implementations. Siemens platform purports to allow outside organizations to develop applications (open architecture), so you get the choice between best-in-class and single vendor. Plus, it’s my understanding that you can continue to use Solid Edge as a desktop application or license it with SaaS flexibility.

The word platform is just business jive du jour for what we would call an ecosystem post-Jobs. Or post-Hirschtick we might have called it a partner program. In any case, it’s a digital world where a lot of applications are developed for product development and downstream digital processes, but outsiders are invited to code additional tools to standards. Like Microsoft, maybe.

Anyway, regardless of which flawed analogy you choose to understand “the platform”, you get the idea. It’s more of the same, but finally admitting that the Gold Partner program sort of approach is being altered. It might also be telling that in the past when we said “the platform”, we meant “the OS” – Windows, Mac, Linux. Make what you will of that. So now every time you run into the word Xcelerator, just think Siemens digital transformation. You’re going to be hearing more of this.

Also related to the Xcelerator deal is the new look of the interface. As you might expect, something called a platform is going to require a unified look across multiple applications. NX and Solid Edge have been creeping toward this for years, but Xcelerator is bigger than just NX and SE.

There’s a lot more to talk about. Technical details about what’s new for users, and more about CAD philosophy as well. But for now, I’m going to call this a post. After all, you can only read so much at a time.