Action-Packed SolidWorks World 2010
For those of you not able to attend SolidWorks World 2010 in Anaheim, California earlier this year, let us recap some of the most significant events related to the show. As usual, SolidWorks lined up a number of interesting and motivational speakers (James Cameron, James McLurkin, Jeff Ray, and Bernard Charles). There were also a handful of product and technology announcements related to PDM and Design Automation that made this year particularly interesting.
Regarding speakers at the event, James Cameron (director and inventor) and James McLurkin (roboticist and inventor) were big crowd-pleasers. Most people have come to expect that Jeff Ray (SolidWorks CEO) will speak at the annual event, but a few people were surprised by some of the content he delivered at the show. In particular, many were surprised by his guest and co-speaker, Bernard Charles (Dassault Systemes President and CEO). Together, Jeff and Bernard had some very interesting things to share about the Dassault / SolidWorks relationship. In general, attendees got the feeling that SolidWorks is more a part of the Dassault family than they might have originally thought.
Beyond the feeling that Dassault would start to increasingly become a larger part of SolidWorks users’ lives, there were a number of specific developments coming out of the show:
- SolidWorks has been working for the past several years on a browser-based version of SolidWorks. Although the announcements were mainly about technology (and not yet about specific products), the crowd was very excited by what was shown and how SolidWorks plans to leverage cloud computing.
For Design Automation users, it was interesting to see an increased number of vendors present at the show selling automation and configuration tools. The biggest highlight was around the buzz about the upcoming release of DriveWorks 7 (due out in February / March).- SolidWorks has a new product line, SolidWorks PLM. This line will include a number of offerings, the
first of which is cloud-based data management named SolidWorks Product Data Sharing (PDS). This software was demonstrated on the last day of the show, operating right inside of SolidWorks. For those paying close attention, the PDS plug-in showed a label, “powered by ENOVIA V6.”
As usual, SolidWorks put on a top-notch conference and user event with loads of educational content. The underlying theme of the announcements and sneak-peaks at the show seemed to reflect a tighter relationship between Dassault Systemes and their SolidWorks brand. We’re excited about the developments around SolidWorks Enterprise PDM, SolidWorks PLM, the PDS product, and ENOVIA V6 and will share more information on these subjects as the details unfold. To see more details about the key themes we noticed at the show, check out these SolidWorks World 2010 videos:
Tags: cloud computing, Dassault Systemes, DriveWorks 7, ENOVIA V6, Enterprise PDM, SolidWorks, SolidWorks PLM, SolidWorks Product Data Sharing, SolidWorks World
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