What’s New in Solid Edge 2022 Part 2: Talk with Dan Staples

I had a chance to talk to Dan Staples about the new release of Solid Edge 2022.

Matt: As a Solidworks user I can’t help but notice that some of the new features are playing catchup, but in some areas Solid Edge is way ahead of the competition. Can you talk about the areas where you’re way ahead?

Dan: Convergent/hybrid modeling is clearly a standout area where we’re ahead. That is unique to Siemens, and the Solid Edge implementation is particularly good. If you’re mixing facets with BREP technology, there’s just nobody who can touch us in that domain. It may not be obvious, but the big nut that has been cracked here is that in the past if you took a mesh model and a BREP model and did a boolean between them, the result would be all mesh. That’s no longer true. Everything that was mesh stays mesh, everything that was BREP stays BREP even though they are now conjoined.

There are also some places where we offer unique solutions as part of the portfolio. The Simcenter FlowMaster (fluid flow through process circuits) stuff is not something Solidworks can really offer. Xcelerator Share is really quite interesting. Our new offering CAM Pro 2.5 axis for free to all maintenance paying customers. Yes, Solidworks has done that in the past with a very limited capability built off of a third party. But this is full-blown 2.5 axis best-in-the-business stuff, and every Solid Edge customer on maintenance gets it for free. We will absolutely kill them on 2.5 axis CAM.

Matt: Synchronous has been a tough sell to some hard core history-based users. Generative is seen with some skepticism by some. How is sub division modeling going to be any different?

Dan: New technologies have some difficulty penetrating into the engineering space. Engineers tend to be a conservative breed. What subd brings to the table is that its more obvious the amount of work being saved. When you’re working in the history tree, you become so ingrained in that way of working that you just don’t believe that anything can be any better. On the other hand, if you’ve done any surfacing modeling at all, you’re absolutely convinced that there has to be a better way because the history-based method is just SO painful. The need for change is just so much more obvious in organic shape design than it is in machine design.

Matt: Do these mesh related tools really belong in mechanical CAD software?

Dan: Yes, absolutely. We’re bringing these tools out of the back room where someone with special tools and knowledge has to work with these things, and then you’re having all of the interoperability problems amd all that stuff. So, yeah. Bringing together the mesh and the BREP is superbly important. In the last 10 years mesh has become super important and used a lot. You’ve got reverse engineering, additive manufacturing, subd modeling, medical applications. Mesh is really important, and engineers are using it. It doesn’t belong as its own distinct tool set with data conversion between the two.

And the same is true about the point cloud. I don’t know how much time you’ve spent with the point cloud at the plant level but the point cloud stuff is really pretty remarkable. We can scan it so dense we don’t need triangles any more. Each point has its own color, so you can keep zooming in and zooming in and you’re just going to see a ghosted, transparent sort of cloud. We can literally sling a Billion points without batting an eye. Unless you can operate at 10, 20, 30 hz or whatever, you’re not really working.

Matt: Is the new configurator connected to Rulestream or Driveworks?

Dan: No, and no. Rulestream is more in the enterprise space typically with a fair amount of consulting involved. We expect users to use this configurator out of the box. We worked with a third party (not Driveworks) to develop this. It competes very favorably with Driveworks.

Matt: How is Solid Edge keeping pace with all of the engineers that are now required to work at home fully or in part?

Dan: Actually we were ahead of the curve on this one. We had cloud-enabled licensing about 4-5 years ago. Instead of a node-locked or floating license, each session of Solid Edge is licensed through logging in on an on-line server.

The even bigger deal is Xcelerator Share – Share your data very easily through the cloud, view and mark up your stuff. It really helps with the whole distributed team thing. Even share a session over Teams. The whole (email based) eDrawings thing is passe at this point in our opinion, customer/supplier collaboration, markup and commenting on the web. It could be used as an interoffice dropbox or sorts, but I think the primary use case will be more of the customer/supplier collaboration and communication.

It was kind of serendipitous that a lot of Xcelerator Share was already developed by the time the pandemic really came and change the way people work.

Matt: Speaking of cloud, what can you say about the direction of Solid Edge vis a vis the cloud? Are you going to push customers to online software?

Dan: We’re investing heavily in Solid Edge desktop. We are connecting it to the cloud where it makes sense (Xcelerator Share and licensing). As our customers dip their toes in the cloud and want us to drag them in a little further, then we will drag them in a little further. But its definitely the case that desktop with cloud connectedness remains super important to us. We think we can marry those two in a reasonable way.

A big thank you to Dan and John Fox who were patient with my questions.

Come back tomorrow where I’ll talk about some of my favorite new enhancements in Solid Edge 2022 (I got a license, so I can show some real examples, not just screen shots pilfered from the What’s New doc!)