Onshape, a New Startup Headed by SolidWorks Veterans, Champions the Cloud

Former SolidWorks cofounders return to challenge the CAD industry with a new venture, Onshape.

Note: This post was revised and updated on Jan 30, with responses from Jon Hirschtick to my queries.

If the same group of people who developed SolidWorks in the 1990s were to go into business together today, what would that company look like? For the answer, you should turn to the new startup Onshape.

The team behind Onshape looks like a small army of SolidWorks defectors, beginning with John McEleney and Jon Hirschtick, former CEO and cofounder of SolidWorks. Scott Harris, cofounder and former VP of new product concepts of SolidWorks; Dave Corcoran, former executive VP of SolidWorks R&D; Joe Dunne, former director of product strategy at SolidWorks; and Darren Henry, former marketing team member of SolidWorks are also in the mix.

In the 1990s, when McEleney and Hirschtick led SolidWorks, the product broke new ground. As an affordable CAD program for Windows desktops, SolidWorks was a departure from the dominant design software titles that cost significantly more and required server-class hardware to operate.

Onshape, the new McEleney-Hirschtick venture, has not yet revealed its product to the public, but the two blog posts published by McEleney and Hirschtick indicate they’ll break new ground once more, this time by challenging the desktop design software industry with a cloud-hosted, mobile-friendly alternative.

On January 7, under the title “Why we started from scratch (again) in the CAD business,” Hirschtick pointedly wrote, “CAD systems still aren’t fast enough, they’re not easy enough, they’re not robust enough or reliable enough. All of the core issues in CAD are still there—and I think as an industry, maybe we’re halfway done.”

Personal desktops, once a challenger to the data centers, are now the established norm, threatened by shifting consumer behaviors. Hirschtick wrote, “Younger people have grown up in a post-desktop world and have different expectations about computers. They don’t even think about having ‘a computer.’ They walk in with their laptops and their tablets and their mobile phones. They expect computing to be modern and available anywhere, anytime on any device. Cloud, web and mobile technologies are our exciting new raw materials for creating CAD.”

On January 21, under the title “Business software has dramatically changed—it’s time for CAD to catch up,”  McEleney similarly observed, “As the giants of other industries are becoming more nimble, our own industry seems to be lagging behind. Many question whether the cloud will have a place in engineering. The CAD industry is one of the last major application sectors to embrace the cloud.”

On its distribution plan, Hirschtick said the company is betting on the SaaS model. “We will work with CAD resellers,” he said, in an email to DE, “but not in the traditional software license model way. In our case, resellers will provide services only—training, support, customization, etc. And we will also have direct sales to users over the web.”

SolidWorks, the CAD product Hirschtick helped built in the 90s, was—and still remains—a classic history-based parametric solid modeler. Of the new product he’s now building at Onshape, Hirschtick said, “We have built an artful blend of parametric and direct editing. We also have some other modeling innovations that we will be unveiling. We are using the Parasolid geometry kernel and are very pleased with it.”

Responding to a comment to his post, McEleney revealed, “Internet connectivity availability is nearly ubiquitous and our mobile solution will work on 4G/LTE networks. With respect to performance—we have architected our system to take advantage of the extensive compute resources available in the cloud ... Current desktops are not getting faster as they have reached clock-speed limits; however, we know that bandwidth is increasing every day. Onshape is the first system that you literally will see improvements in performance without having to do anything—no new system required, no new updates.”

Michelle Boucher, VP of research firm Tech-Clarity, observed, “The makeup of product development teams has also changed. Teams are more global and suppliers are playing a larger role. With these trends, it makes sense that the tools used to design products need to evolve as well. Collaboration in particular, tends to be a real challenge. Managing changes and keeping assembly models up to date, especially when third parties are involved, is still something companies struggle with. Cloud technologies offer opportunities for new approaches to these problems which can lead to some interesting innovation in the CAD market.”

Ken Versprille, Ph.D., executive consultant at CIMdata, said, “Knowing Jon, who could refute his desire to ‘make CAD fun again’ and his ever present commitment to his ‘customers’? Yes, the design world has changed toward more global development, although not so much for many small entrepreneurial product companies. And of course, the general computing world has evolved and CAD has leveraged those improvements. Future changes will continue to impact all software implementations, not just CAD. Today the cloud and its nuances remind us of the evolution of networking and its numerous early variations. As to making CAD easy? The elephant in the room remains—if a fillet can be placed on a CAD model in one of twenty different ways, how can CAD offer the user the full selection of options without imposing a cumbersome user interface?”

Autodesk, a rival to SolidWorks, has begun the migration to cloud-hosted CAD with the launch of Autodesk A360 (the brand includes Autodesk Fusion 360, previously Inventor Fusion), delivering some functions through thin and thick clients, others straight from the browser. Many newer collaboration solutions, like GrabCAD Workbench, delivers project management, file management, version control, and markup features from the browser.

Hirschtick said Onshape will be ready to reveal its product to the media later this year. Whatever that product is, it’s bound to go up against SolidWorks, invented two decades ago by the same talent pool that’s now behind Onshape.