Interview with Dan Staples

I’m not an interviewer, or at least not a good one, as you will see shortly. And my video editing skills are non-existent. Still, watch this 10 minute interview with Dan Staples, director of development for Solid Edge.

Dan makes a distinction between “direct edit” and Synchronous Technology. I guess I just brush off ST as a marketing term for Siemens implementation of direct edit. I get that Siemens implementation is different from Spaceclaim, but to me the technology of moving faces without history-based features is direct edit, no matter how you slice it.

We talked a little bit about SE’s sales numbers, and whether or not SE benefitted from some of the fear that SW users had because of Jeff Ray’s comments. There is a particularly bad edit in the middle of this which allowed me to partially get my foot out of my mouth.

There is an off-screen commenter when talking about Siemens plans for the cloud, and that was Jim Phelan, the public relations director. A little background, Tony Affuso, the CEO of Siemens PLM (formerly Unigraphics Solutions) made comments in the earlier keynote that “we like cloud”. I wanted Dan to clarify what that means for SMB (small and medium businesses) that typically buy Solid Edge (and SolidWorks).

Another important part of what Dan talks about in this interview is that he is aggressively targeting the machine design space. It is the largest segment in the mechanical (not architectural) CAD market. I try to push him a little on consumer product design, but it seems that neither architecture nor consumer product design are going to distract Solid Edge from their goals in the machine design market. This is one of the things that makes me like these guys. They are focused on something. SolidWorks in the early days was focused on something.

Dan also talks about the problems inherent in kernel swapping, having actually done a kernel swap. He was unwilling to comment on the possible benefits or detriments of SW swapping in the Catia kernel, but what he has to say about success rate may be an eye opener for users who will have to live through the swap.