Cloud-native engineering software is easier to use, faster to deploy, and more conducive to collaboration.
Autodesk has sponsored this post.
“Data is the lifeblood of any company that’s looking to bring a product to market,” says Jon den Hartog.
It’s a strong but unsurprising statement. Data is often likened to the oil of the information age: crude 1s and 0s refined by algorithms and turned into extravagant profit. But for den Hartog, it’s not the sheer quantity of data that matters, but its accessibility. As Senior Director of Product Management at Autodesk, den Hartog’s goal is to ensure every user in every product development team has the data they need when they need it.
But that goal is impossible to achieve with traditional desktop software. The only way out is up—into the cloud. Den Hartog believes that cloud-based software presents an opportunity for designers and manufacturers to fundamentally change how they work and collaborate.
The Three Key Benefits of the Cloud
For many, the COVID-19 pandemic made the need for a new way of work unignorable. The pandemic put pressure on designers and manufacturers to adapt to shifting norms, unstable supply lines, and fluctuating consumer demand. The old way couldn’t cut it. A new approach was required, and data was at its heart.
“Data has long been important,” den Hartog says. “I think the manufacturing world has appreciated that for a while, but it’s only become more visible recently with the acceleration that’s happened over the past few years with the pandemic.”
For Autodesk, acceleration may be an understatement. Last month, the software company announced that it plans to rebuild all of its products—which span three major industries—on a cloud foundation. It will be a multi-year transition, but the roadmap is set by Autodesk’s most mature cloud offering, the design and manufacturing platform Autodesk Fusion 360.
“Fusion 360 was intended to be a disruptive product from the beginning,” den Hartog says. When it debuted in 2013, Fusion was a first foray into the cloud for a company that was deeply rooted in desktop software. Nine years and one million monthly users later, Fusion 360 has become Autodesk’s cloud flagship.
Den Hartog has enjoyed a front-row seat to it all. He credits the success of Fusion 360 to a superior user experience, made possible thanks to three key benefits of cloud-based software: the ability to integrate disparate applications, the opportunity for users to work concurrently, and the ease of automating workflows.
Integration: The Key to Greater Efficiency
Desktop software is typically divided. There’s one application for 3D modeling, another application for rendering, yet another for simulation, and so on. Where these applications interact, it’s usually through clunky imports and exports of proprietary file types.
The cloud, however, enables a more unified approach. A shift from file-based data to a cloud-hosted database means that any application has access to the same core information, which it can read and update seamlessly. Applications can present that data to the user in whatever form is most appropriate, such as a solid model, a finite element mesh, or a spreadsheet bill of materials.
Because of this, the cloud enables formerly discrete applications to come together under one roof. Like swapping a lens on a camera, users of cloud-based software platforms can swap between applications to see their data in different ways and manipulate it accordingly. In Fusion 360, users can swap between 3D modeling, electrical design, CAM programming, simulation, rendering and more without ever leaving the platform or opening different file types.
“Users can access a wide array of capabilities in a single experience and tap into the power that they need at the right moment, as opposed to having to maintain many different applications installed on their desktop, which becomes impractical and very difficult to manage across a large team,” den Hartog says.
Concurrency: Working Together is Better
No engineer is an island, and product development is a dance between many different stakeholders. To den Hartog, the second big advantage of the cloud is concurrency–meaning that no dancer has to worry about stepping on another’s toes.
“The cloud enables multiple users to work on things together in a fluid way,” den Hartog says. This is partly a result of the first benefit, integration, since the same data can be used in different ways at the same time. The cloud eschews the rigid file management practices of desktop workflows, which require file check-ins and check-outs to avoid overwrites and other errors. With the cloud, there’s a single source of data, and nobody who needs it is ever locked out.
“Being able to work together concurrently allows users to be more flexible in where they’re working and who they bring into their team, wherever they’re located throughout the world,” says den Hartog.
Automation: Focus on High-Value Tasks
Building on integration and concurrency, the third key benefit of cloud-based software is its capacity for automation. Automation relies on having access to the right data at the right time. Because it enables an integrated approach to data, the cloud is particularly well-suited to automated workflows.
“When you have all these capabilities integrated together and you’re able to make coordinated changes across different users with compute engines that are running in the background, you can automate things,” den Hartog says.
He points to an example within Fusion 360, where work is underway to automate the process of creating drawings from 3D models. “The system intelligently applies dimensions to drawings, and it’s able to present suggestions to cut out a lot of that documentation effort,” den Hartog explained.
Accessible Data on the Cloud
Most of us are familiar with the benefits of cloud storage. Saving files to the cloud makes it easier to centrally manage data across distributed teams, and providers like Autodesk will continue developing and improving their traditional software so customers can take advantage of the cloud where possible. However, software built from the cloud up has a slew of advantages over that traditional desktop software. It provides the opportunity for highly integrated workflows, the ability to collaborate in real-time with anyone, anywhere, and it’s inherently primed for automating away tasks to reduce errors and give engineers more time to focus on innovating. Together, these advantages mean that cloud-based engineering software can offer a user experience far greater than that of traditional applications. And that experience is starting to become the expectation.
“This is not just a vision of the future,” den Hartog says. “The next generation that will be coming into the professional workforce in the next 10 years will have fundamentally different expectations of how tools work. It’s something we’re seeing from the students using our tools today. We’re trying to meet those expectations for ease of use, productivity, and flexibility while making sure that when it comes to cutting metal or making a big decision on a design, the data in the cloud enables collaboration as well as control and management.”
To learn more about Fusion 360, visit Autodesk.com.
