What I think I’ve learned about Synchronous Technology

I”ve been guessing a lot about what functionality the term Synchronous Technology was meant to obfuscate. I”ve been both wrong and right about some of my guesses. I”m not the only one. Even Evan Almighty has been wrong and right, but mainly irrelevant. Very few people have any real “facts” about this stuff. We hear what some people want to be true, and some people just blindly repost press releases without any idea at all what it means. We”ve heard some strange emotional rants about why the world needs something like this as opposed to something or anything else, and some equally strange posts seemingly defending SolidWorks from the need to keep up with the Joneses.

I”ve been lucky enough to have Dan Staples of the Solid Edge development team and Chris Kelley, a Siemens marketing guy both stop by the blog here and leave some comments. Dan in particular has been very helpful with the only hard facts I”ve heard anywhere about Synchronous Technology. Even the ST white paper is very heavy in vague declaratives. The truth is that most of those videos posted about ST, well, I”ve been tempted to post equivalent videos of SolidWorks doing exactly the same thing. Not because I have an axe to grind, but just to show that the examples we have seen of ST have been unconvincing because the capabilities already exist in SW and other places. This is why some folks have said ST is nothing new. I think Siemens has done a wonderful job of creating hype, and a less than wonderful job of backing it up. But of course that may be the main attraction of hype – not backing it up is what makes it hype in the first place.

So what have we learned?

– Synchronous Technology means that all of the relations in a part are solved simultaneously instead of linearly.

In SolidWorks, mates in an assembly are all solved simultaneously. So are sketch relations. These are driven by D-Cubed, also owned by Siemens. What are two of the least reliable areas of the SolidWorks software? You got it, sketch relations and mates. Go back and count how many times I”ve singled those two areas out as things I would like to have fixed. I think this is a bad omen for ST. D-Cubed proves that simultaneous solutions are not an incredibly reliable source. Of course SW”s problems could be an implementation issue, and it still remains to be seen how Solid Edge”s implementation of simultaneous solutions for relations within a solid model is going to work in real every day modeling.

There is no doubt, history can be a cumbersome way to create geometry, but it is also just as often a great asset when making changes. Getting away from history is a great theory, but based on what I”ve seen of simultaneous solutions, there may be a reason why other CAD companies are not flocking to it.

– Synchronous Technology really is something new – a new way of putting together a lot of old stuff.

“Synchronous” can mean “solving relations simultaneously”. Or it can mean integrating several modeling technologies or techniques. I think the “synchronous technology” term benefits from some intentional double entendre, but at the same time is sufficiently vague that it doesn”t mean anything in specific as a stand alone phrase. All of this probably makes sloganeering marketing people wet their pants in glee. Still, clever new names or not, this is all familiar territory.

Simultaneous solutions? Check. D-Cubed. Shaky foundation. Been there, done that.

Driving dimensions and geometrical relationships on “dumb” geometry? Check. Spaceclaim.

Feature recognition? Another shaky foundation. Check. Several CAM products use this, as well as FeatureWorks.

Live Rules? Behind the marketing name, this is indistinguishable from parametric relations. In fact, it looks much like parametric relations applied directly on the solid model. Dan sort of confirmed this, I think. Parametric relations on a solid model to me is the one thing to really get excited about with ST. The screen grab below was taken from a youtube video.

– Siemens is totally changing directions in the high end and midrange markets, and is throwing this Hail Mary in the hopes that all the commotion may attract more attention than all of the Spaceclaim and CoCreate non-news.

With Synchronous Technology, Solid Edge has removed itself from the SolidWorks – Inventor fray. They have been removed for some time, they just never admitted it until now. Personally, I think the hype has been brilliant, but the failure to follow up the hype with some sort of intelligible scheme that real users can understand leaves the whole thing looking like the vacuum cleaner salesman saying “trust me!!” It”s kind of telling that I had to dig this info out of people, and that Siemens clearly does not have a clear and intelligible message for users.

Chris Kelley appears to be a one-man Solid Edge blog machine, but he is marketing, not technical. Really, are there any technical Solid Edge blogs out there? Why are they not giving us the low-down from a users point of view (or are they and I”m just not seeing it?) I”m not bashing Solid Edge as a product, I don”t know enough about it to bash it. It seems so much like SolidWorks as to be practically the same, historically, anyway. But the product hasn”t seen the broad industry acceptance that SolidWorks has seen, so Siemens had nothing to lose by changing the rules and aiming low.

What I mean by “aiming low” is that the whole direct editing movement seems to be enthralled with the ease of use idea. I think this is meant to expand the definition of a “CAD user” to mean someone lower on the specialization totem. The message here is “ease of use” rather than “power” or “control”. These ideas always seem to be diametrically opposed.

– What remains in Solid Edge is no longer a history based modeler.

Some people who don”t know (including me) have said that ST is Spaceclaim bolted on to SolidWorks. I don”t believe this to be the case. I”m now under the impression that ST is Spaceclaim bolted on to CoCreate, or there abouts. There is no history left. Siemens has abandoned history based modelers. This seems to be one of the things that Dan was saying.\n\nMany UG users I have known have said that UG never was much for history based modeling, and with Solid Edge showing as an “also ran” in the parametric history based market space, it is no surprise that they decided to changed direction, possibly if for no other reason than to distinguish themselves from SW and IV. So now they have a chance of being on the top of the heap of non-history based modelers, and trying to capitalize on the wave of direct editing modelers really rejuvenated by the popularity and simplicity of Sketchup, and given a shot in the arm by Spaceclaim.

Summary

Solid Edge and Unigraphics/NX are both strong products, but they aren”t market leaders. Solid Edge was acquired from Intergraph, and part of NX is SDRC. How is Siemens going to grow this set of products? A bold move like completely rearchitecting the software might not have been inevitable, but it really isn”t a huge surprise.

I”m very interested to see what rank and file Solid Edge users think of these changes. For those that are happy with the history-based view of the world, Solid Edge may have just handed SolidWorks a small infusion of new customers. There are several people who are not paid by Siemens who are going around claiming that this stuff is the answer to all their prayers, even though they have never laid hands on the software or fully understand how it really works.

I”m going to guess that the new Solid Edge will have a little burst of sales just due to curiosity, but in the end, interest will wane. There is a reason why products like IronCAD, CoCreate, KeyCreator and Spaceclaim have not become overwhelmingly poplular while products like Pro/ENGINEER, SolidWorks and Inventor have. I don”t think a massive hype campaign is going to be enough to change this decades old momentum.\n\nIt may be a great idea, and it may have required some revolutionary thinking to bring it to fruition, but I think Synchronous Technology is going to become another forgettable buzzword that marked a sharp turn in the road for an “also ran” history based modeler.