“It’s CAD Jim, but not as we know it …….”

All you trekkers out there will know this draws from an immortal phrase uttered by Spock to Capt. James Kirk to express something new outside their current experiences.

I have taken the liberty to extend it to refer to the On-Cloud capabilities of CATIA – it’s something much more than a CAD system.

Over the years CAD has now become such a well-known and used term that it is all encompassing – referring to something that is 2D and free, right through to some of the higher end more expensive solutions such as ProEngineer, NX and CATIA.

To label them all as CAD does a disservice to these capabilities.

We are now faced with the same challenge with the next generation of CAD On the Cloud. The vendors have all begun developing their solutions to work as a Cloud service, some starting from the beginning and writing from the ground up. Inevitably these are primitive in their functions, as they are completely new code and yet to be long term tested and proven in the commercial world. But it’s still CAD on the Cloud.

Dassault were early into appreciating the evolution of applications to being a web service offering and began architecting their next generation applications several years ago – through acquiring software technologies that would build a web based platform. Released now as the 3DEXPERIENCE platform as a Cloud solution, it now delivers the broadest range of capabilities for any Cloud app.

The 3DEXPERIENCE on Cloud platform is a foundation upon which specific geometry apps reside. The platform is a database, providing a single vault of information that is easily searchable, allowing configurable access rights, and management of information across all apps. Wrapped around the database is then collaboration capabilities such as concurrent design, co-review and much more -  giving a highly functional collaboration platform. All this is out of the box, when you acquire one of the geometry applications such a CATIA On Cloud.

So you thought CATIA was a CAD system?

No, not anymore. CATIA 3DEXPERIENCE on Cloud is a collaboration platform that does CAD but a whole lot more …… something maybe even Spock couldn’t imagine.

 or