Duro Design is a ground-up revamp of Duro’s cloud PLM platform, and in other news, Onshape gets MBD.
You’re reading Engineering Paper, and here are the latest headlines from the world of design and simulation software.
Duro, the cloud-based PLM provider, has relaunched its platform as Duro Design.
Michael Corr, co-founder and CEO of Duro, told me that the change is more than just a new product name. “It’s really a new product… a revolution of what we’re doing, not just an incremental evolution,” he said.
Duro first launched its eponymous PLM platform in 2018, targeting startups and small-to-medium businesses looking for a quick and modern alternative to that jack-of-all-trades, Excel.
“We were very limited in functionality and very automated and opinionated, because we just helped customers implement industry best practices out of the box,” Corr said.
Since then, Corr said, the market for modern PLM tools has evolved. “The level of innovation that’s happening today is unprecedented,” he said, referring both to new hardware companies and the SaaS software startups catering to them. Duro’s customers wanted more capability, configurability and compatibility, and Corr saw that the platform could either adapt or harden into the same kind of stale PLM tool it had been built to disrupt.
“We recognized there was a unique small window to just completely revamp our platform and really meet what this market had evolved to be,” Corr said.
Duro Design is that revamp. Duro’s legacy PLM platform will be phased out and the company will help existing customers migrate to Duro Design.
So what’s the difference? A big part of it, as you might imagine, is AI. Corr describes Duro Design as “AI-native,” a phrase which I asked him to define (lest it come across as marketing fluff).
“Deep refactoring of our platform allowed us to leverage what was becoming the best practices for building AI-based tools,” Corr told me. “We changed our database structure, we changed our API structure, so that AI technologies, LLMs and even generative AI capabilities, were being built natively in the core of our platform, versus being a bolt-on after the fact.”
For example, Duro Design uses AI for natural language search, helping users more easily sort through heaps of design data. Users can also manage their PLM environment with AI by prompting changes to the underlying YAML configuration language (YAML ain’t markup language, if you’re a fan of backronyms). Duro Design also uses AI to analyze change orders and provide predictions and recommendations, according to Corr.
AI isn’t the only difference. Sandwich in a P and you get another tentpole of Duro Design: API.
“Following an API first approach, every single feature that we offer is exposed through the API,” Corr said, in contrast to the more limited API of the legacy platform. “[Users] can reconfigure their account as they wish. They could build their own integrations. They can even build their own front end web client if they wanted to.”
As far as integrations go, Duro offers plenty of its own with add-ins for Solidworks, NX (or should I say Designcenter), Altium 365, Onshape and more.
Speaking of Onshape…
Onshape gets MBD
PTC announced that its cloud CAD platform Onshape will soon be capable of model-based definition (MBD). The feature is in an “an early visibility program with select customers,” according to the press release, “and is expected to be generally available in late 2025.”
What is MBD? There are many bickering definitions for this engineering acronym, but when it stands for model-based definition it refers to annotating a 3D model with manufacturing data such as materials, dimensions, tolerances and the like. It’s an alternative to the standard 2D drawings that everyone loves to hate (but that don’t seem to be going away anytime soon).
“Our new MBD capabilities remove the need to interpret 2D drawings by embedding PMI [product manufacturing information] directly into the 3D model,” David Katzman, PTC’s general manager of Onshape and Arena, said in the release. “And because Onshape is cloud-native, this information is instantly accessible to everyone who needs it, from any device and any location. It’s a major step forward in making MBD practical and scalable for real-world use.”
PTC is showing off Onshape’s MBD this week at the Paris Air Show with their customer Aura Aero (June 16 – 19 2025, Zone B4). Check it out if you’re in town (but you might want to stay away from the Louvre).
Design and Simulation Week 2025
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Running from July 14 – 18, 2025, this series of expert webinars will explore the top trends in engineering software from some of the leading voices in the industry (and me). You’ll learn about AI, automation, multiphysics and how to make the most of modern tools.
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One last link
DiffusionRenderer is a pretty cool new AI-based rendering tool from Nvidia. It takes a 2D video and strips out the geometry and material info in order to plug in different lighting conditions, like changing a scene from day to night. In addition to its creative applications, Nvidia says it’ll help generate synthetic data for robotics training and autonomous vehicle development.
Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.
