WorldCAD Access

PTC: "We're ready to be on the cloud."

During this week's conference call with financial analysts, PTC was asked by Jay Vleeschhouwer of Ticonderoga Securities :

I suppose I have to ask obligatory cloud question. Dassault, particularly their SolidWorks business, have made quite a lot of commentary recently about their intentions for putting apps on the cloud that may entail some possible changes in licensing models and the like, away from your industry.

Oracle had a fairly well attended event yesterday for customers on cloud computing here in New York. So something's going on obviously. I'm just curious as to your thoughts on the cloudiness issue.

PTC president James Heppelmann responded:

We're ready to be on the cloud. We are on the cloud in a limited way right now [through our Windchill PLM software]. But I don't think that the cloud in and of it self changes that much in our industry. It's a different sort of deployment option. 

This is an application that runs on a server and whether that server's in your data center or up in somebody else's being run for you and delivered to you as a service -- what that technology does and the business advantage it brings to you is what's most important.

I don't think SolidWorks is going to go on any big growth spurt because they're putting apps in the cloud. I just don't feel like the cloud has proven itself in many industries, quite frankly...
 
The truth is, it's worked well in pretty select industries like CRM [customer relationship management] and there's a whole lot of industries it hasn't been very impactful to. So we'll keep monitoring it.

• We've had this Windchill on-demand thing for quite some time.
  
• Agile had an on-demand solution. 
  
• The Arena guys -- previously known as bomb.com -- have a pure cloud solution.

 So the idea of clouds for PLM [product lifecycle management] is not a new idea, but it is an idea that really hasn't seen much adoption on the customer side and, as I pointed out many times before, that there's a technical issue around bandwidth and large data sets.

And then there's a sort of emotional issue around the protection of crowned-jewels-type IP [intellectual property]. People are just a little afraid to put the latest thinking of their corporation, their latest design up into a cloud when they're not 100% sure that it's safe up there.

It seems like it should be [safe], but it's a real concern that doesn't seem to go away.

Source. 

Dassault to PTC: eat our dust

PTC is making much of its plan to increase its EPS (earnings per share) by 20% a year for five years. (I wonder what happens after the Five-Year Plan ends?) A company gets more earnings by increasing revenues and cutting costs. Considering that PTC's revenues might only increase by 7% this year, that's a whole lot of cost cutting that's gotta happen.

In today's conference call, Dassault Systems shot back: "We are increasing our non-IFRS EPS growth target to about 18 to 23 percent growth," says cfo Thibault de Tersant. Well, Q1 was "just" 16%, so DS also has some catching up to do -- with itself.

Also extracted from DS is the number of seats of SolidWorks sold:

1Q09 = 9,070 @ $5,372 per seat 
1Q10 = 9,843 (up 8%) @ $5,264 per seat (down 2%)

Between March 2009 and 2010, Dassault shed 214 jobs.

Source.

eBooks.onLine now carried by ArchBlocks Web portal

A key to successful publishing is distribution, and so I am pleased to announce a new reseller of my eBooks.onLine line of ebooks. Kevin McWhirter of ArchBlocks has spent the last few days adding a number of my most recent AutoCAD ebooks to his site. 

In addition, he's bundled three of them -- Tailoring AutoCAD 2010, Tailoring AutoCAD 2010 CUI, and Tailoring AutoLISP-DCL-Diesel -- into a single volume, with a discounted download price of $49.

You can take a look at his site here, which also carries symbols and fonts.

Serious CAD will never appear on the iPad because prices are too low

You can get viewers and some simple sketching software for the iPhone, iTouch, and iPad, but you will never get a real CAD package. That's because the Apple Store pricing structure is w-a-a-y too low. 

Sure, there are some high-priced apps, like the $1000 one for studying for law exams. But it's one thing to flash questions and answers from a database; quite another to operate solids and surface modeling with hardware accelerated graphics and floating-point operations.

99-cent pricing doesn't work when there's the cost of royalties to D-Cube, Spatial, Microsoft, and others + the 30% Apple takes for itself. Frankly, I feel bad for iPhone/iPad developers who feel pressure to price low.

So, how much could a CAD package cost on iPad?

Dassault revenues flat y-o-y.

Dassault Systems reports Q1 revenues of e311.9 million, up a mere 1% from the recessionary quarter a year ago -- but down by 8% from last quarter's e339.0 million.

They are projecting Q2 revenues of e360-370 million, and increased the projected income for 2010 to e1.41-1.44 billion (about $1.8 billion)

SolidWorks

Of interest to us is how SolidWorks (disguised by DS as "mainstream 3D software revenue") is doing, and its sales are down a smidgen from a year ago, but up 11% from last quarter:

1Q10 = e70.9 million
4Q09 = e64.0 million     
1Q09 = e71.1 million

My book on Graebert's ARES CAD software is now available

Earlier this year I finished writing Inside ARES as an introduction to drawing and editing in 2D and 3D with ARES CAD software from Graebert. The book is now available for purchase from http://www.graebert.com/#23 -- as well as previewing a chapter. 

(Since I was paid a lump sum for writing the book, I don't make any money on sales.)

Okino's 14th annual release of its 3ds/Maya translators for CAD, digital content

Okino Computer Graphics is shipping the 2011 versions of its translators:

• PolyTrans-for-3ds-Max works with 3ds Max 2011 and 3ds Max Design 2011
• PolyTrans-for-Maya for Maya 2011

The two translators handle the following formats:

• Autodesk Softimage and dotXSI
• ACIS SAT
• Autodesk Inventor
• BVH/Acclaim
• CATIA v4 & v5
• Cinema-4D
• Collada
• DirectX
• DXF/DWG
• DWF-3D (Revit)
• ESRI
• FACT
• FBX
• HOOPS
• IGES
• JT
• Lightwave
• NGRAIN 3KO
• OpenFlight
• OpenGL C code
• Parasolid
• PDB
• PLY
• Pro/Engineer (using an embedded copy of PTC’s Pro/Engineer)
• Rhino
• RIB
• Solid Edge
• SolidWorks
• SketchUp
• STEP
• STL
• SW3D
• U3D
• Wavefront OBJ
• VET
• VRML
• XAML
• X3D
• XGL

...and others. In addition, third-party plug-ins are available from companies like Act-3D, CATS, Maxon, Realicon, and Visual Components. More info here www.okino.com/conv/conv.htm

PTC keeps predicting it'll be back in the Billion-Dollar Club this year

PTC is the canary in the coal mine we call the CAD business, as it is the first of shareholder-owned CAD vendor to report its quarterly results. The Q2 revenues of $240.6 million are up 7% year-over-year -- but down 7% from last quarter.

Traders took the news poorly, felling the share price by 7% in after hours trading.

The company figures Q3 will bring in $235-$245 million (flat with this quarter), but that the entire year will still nudge it back into billion-dollar territory ($1.015 billion). The company plans to grow itself 20% a year for the next five (2.5x larger, compounded), meaning it has to find another $1.5 billion in revenues from somewhere.

Taking a shot at Autodesk's Carl "We Don't Do PLM" Bass,PTC president James Heppelmann crowed, "We believe there is a lot of momentum in the PLM market...".

PTC is ticked off, however, at the weak Euro, which will harm its revenues by as much as $18 million this year. Oh those Greeks.

Source.

This week in upFront.eZine: Explaining BIM to small firms

From this week's issue of upFront.eZine:

1. Explaining BIM to Small Firms
       - Integrated Project Delivery
       - The 50-year Question

2. Can Solid Edge Survive Siemens?
        - Readers Respond

3. Boeing Plans to Read CAD Data 70 Years from Now
        - Readers Respond, Part 2


You can read all about it at www.upfrontezine.com/2010/upf-643.htm

The danger that awaits you from the cloud

The cloud is not new, and so we are able to collect practical information as users report the experiences from current and earlier experiments. A lot of the discussion is happening over at Deelip.com.

See http://www.deelip.com/?p=2209#comment-46777548, for example, where a user reports he found that 3DVia strips solid data from files he saved:

Now we have one vendor denying users access to their own data. Our dystopian future could be like a interminable cell phone contract for manufacturers.

At this point, I see just two benefits to the cloud:

• Access data "anywhere" (although the "anywhere" claim is part-myth, and vendors will be forced to add footnoted disclaimers, exceptions, exemptions, and "nothing's our fault"-isms).

• Prevention of piracy when users can no longer "steal" software. Problem is, it looks like there might be the possibility that some CAD vendors themselves could become the pirates when they "steal" user-created data, accidentally or otherwise.

I've noted before the rush to embrace personal computing revolution that freed us from the tyranny of centralized computing. I am baffled by the urgency to return to the bad old days.