Declining to get drawn into the fast-growing market for product lifecycle management (PLM) products, 3D CAD design software vendor SolidWorks Corp. will instead focus on making fundamental improvements to its current offerings, CEO John McEleney said recently.
Speaking in late January at the company's annual SolidWorks World conference -- which attracted 3,700 attendees -- McEleney said SolidWorks will stick closely to its current mechanical CAD design product strategy, improving ease of use of existing products and bundling more functionality into platforms such as its SolidWorks Office Premium offering. SolidWorks' focus, he noted, differs significantly from that of principal competitor Autodesk Inc. (San Rafael, CA), which has described its direction as "desktop PLM."
"That's trying to force a market that doesn't exist," McEleney said. "Besides," he added, "our [value-added reseller] channel will never compete on the basis of reengineering business processes, which is what PLM is about." The PLM market, he said, is better served by vendors with direct sales forces, including Dassault Systemes SA (Paris), which acquired SolidWorks in 1997.
Remaining focused on 3D mechanical design tools has been good for SolidWorks' business, McEleney noted. The company has recorded sales gains of between 25% and 30% for the past four quarters and now has annual sales of about $250 million, McEleney said. Much of that surge is attributable to customers migrating from 2D to 3D design tools, he said.
While SolidWorks has ventured near PLM with product data management offerings such as PDM Works and collaboration tools such as eDrawings, the company's near-term strategy is to improve existing products, according to McEleney. At SolidWorks World, company officials showed customers an early version of SolidWorks 2007 -- due out this summer -- which will include a new intelligent design feature dubbed SolidWorks Intelligent Feature Technology (SWIFT). One facet of SWIFT called Feature Expert, for example, automatically reconciles conflicts that occur when engineers make design changes. Rather than simply flashing an alert that a design conflict has occurred -- which is what SolidWorks and other CAD tools do today -- Feature Expert automatically works around the conflict.
"We are about reducing CAD overhead and allowing people to build better products," McEleney said. "If we do that, we'll win."
SolidWorks 2007 also will pare down the size of CAD files.
SolidWorks also plans to beef up the capabilities of existing products. The company will bundle its COSMOSMotion tools into the 2006 version of its SolidWorks Office Premium package of products. COSMOSMotion allows users to simulate the motion of product designs.
The company also announced versions of its CAD 2006 and COSMOS design analysis tools, which will run on workstations equipped with the 64-bit version of Microsoft's Windows XP Professional operating system and 64-bit chips from Intel Corp. (Santa Clara, CA) and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (Sunnyvale, CA).
This article originally appeared in the March 2006 issue of Managing Automation magazine.