Is PTC on Pace to Be the Education Leader in Computer-Aided Design?

The pandemic may be the catalyst for a migration to cloud-based CAD future.

What school looked like in 2015 – not long after Onshape was introduced. Students at Aspire Ollin University Preparatory Academy learn Onshape as part of their geometry course’s latest team project. Onshape, which works on any device in a web browser, is usable on Chromebooks, saving students from needing to have workstations at home during the pandemic. (Picture courtesy of Lara Heisser and Onshape.com.)

With students in limbo, cut off from classes and labs during the pandemic, a void has developed in the training and use of engineering software. Design and simulation software has traditionally relied on workstations. CAD vocational training also depends on rows of workstations in computer labs, with fast CPUs and GPUs to handle the graphics. Instruction has quickly gone to remote learning, which is fine for learning the theory of science and engineering, but when learning relies on expensive equipment, like workstations, there is little chance that such equipment is available in students’ home environments.

The void in design software education was one into which a solution was rushed. Why not let students use design software that does not rely on owning a mobile workstation that costs a thousand dollars (or more)? Why not have a CAD program that is usable on cheaper computers or tablets?

For a generation of budding engineers, SOLIDWORKS has been the gold standard. Dassault Systèmes, owner of SOLIDWORKS products, counts 4.5 million education licenses worldwide. For most educational institutions, the decision to go with SOLIDWORKS is based on the necessity of providing education and training with a CAD application that had become the industry standard for professional mechanical design. To have students learn another CAD program would require them to unlearn it upon entering industry and put their graduates at a disadvantage. For vocational schools, training on a temptingly cheap CAD program to achieve mastery of CAD concepts, if not commands, was a nonstarter. SOLIDWORKS certified mastery proven with tests supplied valuable credentials and became the currency of a new career as a mechanical designer.

But access to the computers and the software became impossible or uncertain as schools shut their doors and classes were canceled for fear of spreading COVID-19.

Once itself the standard for schools during the days of 2D with AutoCAD, Autodesk fought back in the 3D MCAD world with Inventor and then followed up with its latest generation of design software, Fusion 360. It was the favored CAD application on the Surface Pro, Microsoft’s tablet/laptop, where it could show off its ability to run on a machine smaller than a workstation. Fusion 360 downloads onto cheaper PCs, Apple computers and tablets, and stores data on the cloud—whereas SOLIDWORKS runs only on Windows.

Once Windows was the reason to buy SOLIDWORKS, but today its exclusivity to Windows has turned into a bit of liability—not just because we are in the middle of a pandemic, but over the course of years, PCs and Windows are getting less love from the younger generation raised on Android and iOS devices.

But, best of all—in the eyes of education administrators—Autodesk was giving Fusion 360 away for free. Students could get a one-year license to Fusion 360 and then renew it at the end of the year. The student version was limited when compared to the commercial version, but it was certainly capable of handling most—if not all—of what classroom exercises, STEM projects and even senior design projects might require. The full spectrum of capability of the $495/year commercial version, which did CAD, CAM, CAE and electrical design was not missed.

And did we mention it was free?

So, what if it was not an industry standard? It came from a company that once had an industry standard (AutoCAD) and could possibly have the next one.

Onshape, released almost 6 years ago, is a CAD program that students could use on the cheapest of computers (Chromebooks, the near-ubiquitous choice of school systems) and tablets. It managed this by installing the program in the cloud, letting the geometric number crunching CAD programs perform on remote servers and display the result on any screen. Onshape took over the burden of providing workstation-level horsepower and capacious storage on the cloud.

Running CAD on the cloud has one big advantage—and disadvantage, too.

The big advantage is that, with the program running on the cloud, all a new user needs to get access to a CAD program is sign up for an account with Onshape. The account is freely provided with only a name, an email address and a password of your choice. You can be anyone—a student, a maker … even an editor. You must verify your email address, but then you can log in. That’s it! In 10 seconds, you have access to a fully capable, professional MCAD program. There’s never been anything like it.

There is nothing to download, so you don’t have to worry about whether you have enough space on your computer or device. By contrast, Fusion 360 requires you to have a minimum of 4GB RAM and 3GB of storage. For tablets and Chromebooks ordered with little memory on the premise that programs and storage used would be on the cloud, this memory will be an issue with Fusion 360. With Onshape, there are no such issues.

Of course, the big disadvantage is that you must be constantly connected. Onshape simply stops working if the Internet connection ceases. Fusion 360 will continue to work offline. You might expect a full-time connected CAD program to suffer delays with each interaction, but Onshape is remarkably responsive, even with a standard home Wi-Fi connection.

Onshape, for all its ease of access, was no toy. It was created by the same team that made SOLIDWORKS.

Best of all, it was free. And music played in the ears of teachers and school administrators. Also, because the program was running on the cloud, they didn’t need to set it up, so no IT support was required. You just got a free account, with nothing more than your email, and suddenly class was back in session. Educators did have to revamp their materials and go back to class themselves to learn a new CAD program—definitely something to be considered. And, like Fusion 360, Onshape was not an industry standard.

But we are in a pandemic, an existential problem for many schools, and concerns about survivability may have prevailed.

They prevailed big time, said PTC CEO Jim Heppelmann during his company’s quarterly earnings call. PTC had acquired Onshape before the pandemic was in full effect but was moving rapidly at its onset. The company quickly swung its Education division from selling Creo to giving away Onshape.

“We set an aggressive goal to try to reach 1 million total education users by the end of fiscal 2021,” said Heppelmann, doubling the number of education users they had at the time. The company got to a million users in 3 months, according to Heppelmann.

So quickly has PTC reached a million educational users (3 months) that if this pandemic continues unabated (God forbid), it will have no trouble catching Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS (with its 4.5 million education seats) and Autodesk.

“It’s one of the greatest shifts I’ve experienced,” said Heppelmann. That’s coming from the top of a company that underwent the last great shift, taking CAD from 2D to 3D with parametric, history-based modeling.

The implications of sustained use by schools are not lost on PTC, a company that has until now focused on industrial use of its software. The more students graduating with Onshape experience, the more likely it is that they will demand its use in the workplace.

“Gaining 1 million student users is a huge milestone with significant implications for PTC well into the future. Manufacturing companies at the very same needs a real-time collaboration and access to data from anywhere and on any device. I continue to think that the COVID crisis is accelerating the SaaS tipping point for the engineering software industry by several years,” said Heppelmann.

Planting the seeds for product use in schools and hoping for them to grow in industry is a long play and, in our experience, not always successful. Apple computers spent millions on the education “market” and were successful in making Apple computers near ubiquitous in schools. However, industry to this day favors PCs. Similarly, Google gives away its docs, email and curriculum, but industry still prefers to pay for Microsoft Office. Nevertheless, champions of educational giveaways have usually pointed to a gradual erosion of the installed base or an inevitable generational shift as youth displaces tradition.

But extraordinary events, like our current pandemic, seem to have sped things up.