It is unusual to see a CEO hawking his CAD program, especially if that CEO is Jon Hirschtick of Onshape. Of reigning CAD royalty, none may command more respect than Hirschtick, founder of SOLIDWORKS. Here he was again at Congress on the Future of Engineering Software (COFES) 2018, and at his side was Joe Dunne, also well-known from his SOLIDWORKS days, doing a hands-on demo.
With standing-room only—Hirschtick usually sells out—in a suite at the Scottsdale Plaza Resort, he told the assembled of recent Onshape innovations.
“We are the fastest improving CAD product,” Hirschtick said.
The cynical among us attributed that to products with the most to improve on, but with all respect to Hirschtick, we nodded approvingly. True to his words, an update happened as the demo progressed, catching the Onshape duo by surprise.
Onshape, an Internet-only CAD program, is prone to lack of Internet connection, making it a risk to show before a live audience. To do it on a hotel wireless connection was just asking for trouble.
However, the program performed almost flawlessly, executing commands in real time with no lags when parts were rotated, etc. There was one pause of less than 10 seconds, which Hirschtick later attributed to the update. He was quick to point out it had far less downtime than old CAD programs that took much longer to update, sometimes a weekend project for the company’s IT team.
But staying in the same hotel and experiencing intermittent internet outages, I had to ask why Onshape remained unaffected over an hour of demoing. No blank screens, no locked cursor, no under-the-breath curses—I was in the front row, so I would have heard. A thorough and complete dependence on the Internet connection during an interactive demo would have made that painfully apparent. Onshape just rolled along.
“Aren’t you getting intermittent outages?” I had to ask after the demo.That would be a show stopper for many potential customers.
“Yeah, we get them,” Hirschtick said. “The program handles it,” he added matter-of-factly, like it was no big deal.
For thousands of potential Onshape users who may have avoided Onshape entirely for fear of lapse and gaps when working offsite, in remote areas, coffee shops, airplanes, hotels lacking enough routers or other less than optimal connected situations, I think that might be a big deal.
How does it work?
"The Onshape browser application (or mobile app) stores a graphical representation of the CAD model locally and synchronizes change instructions with the cloud-hosted database using very little bandwidth," says Jeff Whatcott, Onshape's CMO. "The application constantly monitors network quality and is resilient to occasional temporary losses of connectivity, increased latency, and fluctuations in network throughput. If connectivity loss persists beyond a few seconds, the application will notify the user. When connectivity returns, the user can refresh the application and resume modeling from the point where connectivity was lost. In practice, most users will never notice most fluctuations in network quality and momentary connectivity loss, and will lose very little - if any - design changes in the process."