Manish Kumar knows the company’s product inside and out—and loves using it.
SOLIDWORKS users who are worried that the new CEO, Manish Kumar, will mess with their application or try to migrate them to another application can relax. Kumar is a product guy, as they say in the software industry—not a sales guy, not a marketing guy, not a financial guy. We wanted to confirm his commitment to SOLIDWORKS, the product and its users, so we asked to meet him for the first time in his new role.
The Proof Is in the Test
Perhaps the best proof of Kumar’s dedication to the SOLIDWORKS application is that he passed the Certified SOLIDWORKS Professional (CSWP) test. Only 3 percent [i] of SOLIDWORKS users have this certification. Passing the CSWP assures employers that users are proficient in every command and feature—and there are a lot of them. Most users would not normally use them all.
Unlike other software companies that see their CEO’s proficiency in the application of the software as icing on the cake, SOLIDWORKS makes it a requirement. Nine days into his new position, Kumar was approached by Mike Puckett, head of the SOLIDWORKS certification team.
“Every SOLIDWORKS CEO passed a CSWP exam within one year of taking the job,” said Puckett, according to Kumar’s LinkedIn page.
Kumar got a link to the CSWP test, and three hours later he had passed it. When a certification team member emailed Kumar with an offer to teach him how to use SOLIDWORKS the next day, they were told they were not needed.
“The horse had already left the barn,” Kumar said with a laugh. “I mean, come on. I had already been using the software for 24 years.”
Not a Mechanical Engineer or Designer But …
To learn a program well enough to pass a test feared by mechanical engineers and designers who use the application day in and day out is quite a feat for a coder. Coders, in teams of hundreds at the big engineering software companies, are confined to the minutiae of a single feature or command and specialty. A coder’s career might be the math behind blending B-spline surfaces. A really intuitive 3-axis symbol could be a proud accomplishment for a coder. Kumar, who in charge of bug fixes across all of SOLIDWORKS, made it a point to try out every command and feature he was working on.
We had met Kumar in his previous roles—recently as vice president of R&D at SOLIDWORKS and prior to that, as senior director of product development. We knew of Kumar’s background as a developer. His credentials, degrees from the top schools in the U.S. and India (Harvard and IIT, respectively) in IT and computer science, are public knowledge. His 20+ years of writing code at SOLIDWORKS may put him in a class all by himself.
We have to ask, curious if the role of CEO and all of its requirements, make him miss coding?
“I do,” said Kumar. “Give me a choice any day and I will go back to code.”
That choice may not be offered to him anytime soon. As CEO, Kumar’s responsibilities have grown considerably.
“As brand CEO, I am responsible for the brand revenue of SOLIDWORKS. The sales channels are directly responsible, of course, but the ultimate responsibility of the brand revenue lies with me. First, I have to make sure the product is of the right quality so it will sell. Then, I work with Sales on their initiatives. But at the end of the day, if the brand does not meet its revenue numbers, I get dinged.”
But beyond dealing with Sales, CEOs must deal with brand-specific marketing—and analysts and journalists with all their pesky questions. Does that take a former developer outside their comfort zone?
Kumar admits to nothing being outside his comfort zone.
“I enjoy talking to you, Roopinder,” he said. Kumar is unfailingly polite and pleasant. He thanks people for reading his LinkedIn page. He remembers what you talked about when you last met, or in the case of journalists, what you wrote, all indications of a prodigious memory, attention to the finest detail and an enormous bandwidth—all properties that are sure to endear him to employees, media and analysts.
We worry how a nice guy will hold up against his boss, the formidable Bernard Charlès, CEO of Dassault Systèmes. Charlès may appear to be searching the world for a SOLIDWORKS CEO, starting with the U.S. (Jon Hirschtick, John McEleney, Jeff Ray), then France (Bertrand Sicot), Italy (Gian Paolo Bassi) and now, India. Indian CEOs may be in fashion for American tech companies[ii]. Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Adobe and Twitter are led by executives of Indian descent. So, too, are Ansys and Vectorworks.
We wonder out loud if Kumar and Charlès are still in their honeymoon phase.
Not to worry, Kumar assures us.
“In my role as VP of SOLIDWORKS R&D, I was interacting almost on a weekly basis with Bernard. In the 2009 and 2010 time frame, I started to work on 3DEXPERIENCE platform-related topics. I have been in his radar since then because of those topics I was working on. Now that we talk almost on a weekly basis. If there was a honeymoon phase, we are past it. Bernard knows me. He trusts me.”
Why CEO Change Is a Big Deal at SOLIDWORKS
Why should a change of CEO matter? Most CAD users spend their day immersed in their CAD application, unconcerned with who might be running the CAD business. Eyes locked onto the screen, deep into the design, a veteran CAD user cares primarily that the CAD application is dependable, doesn’t crash and lose their work, can maybe go a little faster sometimes, and every now and then, improve or add a capability.
But SOLIDWORKS users have been different from the start. The company was originally led by Hirschtick and Johnny Mac, mechanical engineers, Americans … guys like them. SOLIDWORKS users were the most ardent and faithful of all CAD users. Veteran users came to SolidWorks World by the thousands, making it the biggest gathering of mechanical CAD users in the world. Like fans to an Eagles concert, all hoping to hear Hotel California, just like they heard it the first time, note for note. Any creativity or variation from the original would throw off their singalong. Why mess with perfection, anyway? You got it right for the album. Bands may want to change their song with the times or be creative, but they forget the song is not theirs anymore. The fans own it now.
So, when a new CEO is introduced to the application’s users—usually at the annual user meetings—welcoming cheers erupt from within the company and a loyal cadre of resellers and third-party vendors. The bulk of the audience, the users gathered to improve their skills by day and hang out over beers afterward, take in management change information as a matter of fact. They are saving their excitement for the What’s New in the New Release and The Top Ten List—the implementation of their most requested features.
But a ripple of concern over the leadership change is detectable. You see some users exchange looks, as if to say, “What will this mean to the software?” In the hallways, whispers are heard. Over beers, the knives come out.
“What will this new guy do to our SOLIDWORKS?”
“Remember when they changed the interface? I didn’t know where anything was!”
“Will we have to move to the cloud?”
“I didn’t hear anything about SOLIDWORKS all day. They only want to talk about 3DEXPERIENCE—whatever that is.”
“How about they just fix SOLIDWORKS? I spend a lot of time rebuilding models.”
The House That Kumar Built
Kumar is eager to apply the SOLIDWORKS application any chance he gets. At the recent 3DEXPERIENCE World, Kumar discussed a desk he built to support the monitors he brought home during the pandemic. He could have gone into the workshop and started cutting wood, as most woodworkers do, but Kumar took the time to model it in detail using SOLIDWORKS.
“It was way overdesigned,” he said, laughing. “There was no reason to use 2 x 6s.”
That was just a little project, he says. It was when he decided to put solar panels on his house that it got interesting.
Kumar’s lives in Acton, Mass., 21 miles northwest of Boston—an area that is steeped in Revolutionary War history. Acton’s Historic District Commission is determined to preserve its image as a colonial town. Solar panels, of course, clash with this vision, so residents seeking permits are required to ensure that the solar panels will not be visible from the street.
Kumar started with a mass model of his house to establish lines of sight to the solar panels but then got carried away.
“I was measuring everything,” he said. And in two weeks, the entire house was modeled down to the posts in the railing, making an assembly of “hundreds, maybe thousands of parts.”
“I measured everything,” noted Kumar. “My wife thought I was crazy.”
Don’t Forsake Us, Say SOLIDWORKS Users
Manish Kumar inherits a big legacy userbase of longtime SOLIDWORKS customers. Many of them worry that Dassault Systèmes is not paying enough attention to their product and is focused instead on its cloud products, the shiny new object, aka, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. If there had been a feeling that Dassault Systèmes was keeping SOLIDWORKS on life support while leaning heavily toward the 3DEXPERIENCE, Kumar intends to put that feeling to rest.
And so, the appointment of a product guy, an actual user, like Kumar may reassure users that the company’s faith in SOLIDWORKS, and commitment to its continuation and growth, is more certain.
[i]The Certification Game: The Ultimate Strategy Guide and Walk-through, Rob Maldonado, EngineersRule.com, June 26, 2018.
[ii]Another Indian CEO. Is the Chai Party Picking Up Steam?, CAD Insider, March 12, 2022.