As you probably know, we recently posted the latest release of Aras Innovator. The focus of Aras Innovator 9.4 is improved performance for multi-CAD management. Why focus on Multi-CAD when simulation, visualization, the cloud and whatnot seem to be what’s hot? Because it's a problem most PLM vendors would prefer to ignore.
The fact is, single CAD environments are a thing of the past. Today, cars, aircraft and even simple children’s toys combine a wide range of mechanical and electronic components with software and firmware. And, as P.J. Jakovljevic of TEC explains in this recent article, enterprise businesses are struggling to gain control of their IP and processes across these disciplines.
Multi-CAD management performance is important because global enterprises are increasingly experiencing significant performance issues with legacy PLM systems as they move to managing multi-CAD environments across mechanical and electronics design.
To develop products in today's complex multiCAD environments, global enterprises need innovative, holistic solutions that can manage data – old and new - across applications, formats, disciplines, geographies, vendors, and more. As P.J. notes, only Aras is responding to the needs of the market.
The major PLM systems from the traditional CAD companies are naturally optimized for their specific CAD products, and there is little incentive to make integrations to competing CAD products with complete and high performance. As a CAD-neutral PLM platform, Aras has focused on delivering high performance across all of the popular third-party CAD products, such as CATIA, NX, Creo, SolidWorks, Inventor, Cadence, Mentor Graphics, etc. Aras is delivering optimized connectors, high-performance application programing interfaces (APIs), a unified CAD data model across mechanical and electronics, and a highly scalable vault replication.
We've made great progress and the market is responding. But, as P.J. cautions, we'll have some competition eventually.
Major PLM/CAD players all know how important managing other CAD systems is, and will likely soon respond to Aras' performance challenge.
No worries. We'll be ready.