Top CAD/3D CEO’s Talk About Apple in the Industry

This group of distinguished leaders range from the world’s largest CAD company to influential innovators. This is the first time such a group, both in this article and the series in general, have been gathered together to share their voices on matters relating to Apple. Taken together, they conspire to give us an informed and engaging map–if not a very accurate one–of the state of affairs for Apple and its platforms in CAD and 3D.

Their views also paint a specific picture for us about their companies–and sometimes products–how they may see things differently from others or the industry in general.

We’ll start this trek by looking at Apple’s growth, in general and in specific….to the Mac and the wave of key software CAD or 3D tools that have been released during the past decade. We were very excited to produce the key graphic of this article (see image 01 below). It was the first time we laid out a timeline image of such software releases. Superimposed over Apple’s revenue and Mac growth picture it clearly stimulates our imagination while providing a soothing sense of accomplishment.

In this article we’ll touch on the growth question which touches aspects such as what developers actually need on the tools side as well as market pressures and business opportunities. The next-generation is always important and Apple has been said to hold the zeitgeist for the young. We’ll briefly cover university changes as we head into the cloud, iOS and the Mac. This article–nor the series–would not be complete without some captured criticism. And we’ll have even more of that in the final articles of the series.

Where are the opportunities for Apple? Where is Apple trying to take the industry and how does it affect CAD and 3D markets? This is what we get into in this special feature, and as always we hope to hear from you below. We start with growth.

Gauging Growth: The Mac in CAD/3D Today

There are some pundits, bloggers and old-school journalists who still find it hard to believe this is all happening. Not only do they find the Mac’s still minority share a sign of its low importance but they struggle contemplating the popularity of Apple’s iOS devices in CAD and 3D industries as well.

But things really have changed. The chart above is both revealing and subtle. Yes, Apple’s revenues have truly taken off (and largely due to iPod, iPhone and now iPad) but during this ten year period Apple has more than quadrupled Mac shipments. More importantly, it essentially did most of this growth during the years its revenue picture began to steeply rise. And it has never been steeper.

While the Mac may not yet be the dominant platform in many CAD and 3D segments, make no mistake about it, many segments have changed dramatically over the past decade. As Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk explains, “It is highly desirable by a number of our customers, particularly in some specific segments, to want to work on Macs. One are architects, two are industrial designers and a third are creative digital artists.” (more Carl Bass views here)

“It is really driven by what our customers want,” says Bass, “and they have spoken pretty loudly. They want to work on Mac.”

The rise and interest in the Mac may be best validated by Autodesk’s CEO but some critics and competition could argue that such a view is doubly optimistic and reflective of the company’s recent investment into the platform. In fact, when speaking to two of the industry’s most respected company heads with longtime investments and support of the Mac in CAD, we found more moderate, but still positive, views.

For example, Sean Flaherty, CEO of Nemetschek Vectorworks, the longtime leader in CAD on the Mac platform, didn’t directly say they see continued growth but instead answered: “We’ve been the CAD leader on the Mac for 15 years so a boost in popularity for the Macintosh definitely propels Vectorworks sales forward.” Interestingly, he remarked that Apple’s Mac popularity has aided CAD and 3D developers by improving the development tools and graphics environment.

“Toolkit developers now more commonly develop Mac versions of their technology,” says Flaherty, “so we have a greater breadth of technology to choose from for integration into Vectorworks.” Flaherty made was some saw as a brilliant decision of choosing to integrate Parasolid, arguably the world’s most advanced modeling geometry kernel, into Vectorworks several years ago. His point about toolkit developers cannot be taken lightly. Like other types of developers, the pressure on toolkit developers to support Apple’s Mac OS X platform is another sign that software developers are in need to bring their software to the Mac platform.

Other newer Mac developers may have a hard time gauging interest in the overall CAD and 3D market for the Mac. Bob McNeel of McNeel and Associates, the makers of Rhino, remarked about the verticality of his company’s application. “Since we are only in the 3D design for fabrication world, we have a pretty narrow view of the whole 3D market,” he said. “In general,” McNeel notes, “it [3D to fabrication] is growing quickly because the cost of 3D fabrication tools is dropping quickly.”

While many segments within the design markets are growing or even exploding in interests–like the “makers market” for example–there is often an assumption that if you are going to develop for any kind of “creative” market you need to support Mac too. “The Mac has always been the platform of choice for the ‘creative’ designer,” says Bob McNeel, “but it seems like the Apple brand has been much enhanced by their mobile product offerings in many of our market segments.” McNeel is referring to the use of Apple laptops often running in Boot Camp to run Rhino and other “maker” tools and 3D prototyping software. “I don’t have any idea how many also boot in OS X.” he said.

The high-level view about the growth question requires a two-fold approach. Firstly, as the chart (see image 01) above shows there has been explosive growth and interest in Apple, generating immense focus on iOS and a steady four-fold expansion of the Mac market. However, and secondly, there are clearly challenges in recognizing what segments are growing, how to identify them, and sometimes technical challenges in counting or measuring them.

Dr. Chris Yessios of AutoDesSys explains that the same application can be installed on either platform. “The ‘renewed’ popularity of the Mac has definitely affected our sales,” he said, “even though we cannot really tell who buys for the Mac and who for the PC.”

next page: Academia: The Next Generation Wants Apple

Academia: The Next Generation Wants Apple

When it comes to the Mac in CAD and 3D markets and its relationship to academia, perhaps no better person to talk to is Dr. Chris Yessios, founder and creator of the 3D stalwart application, formZ. formZ was born in academia, more than 20 years ago. And Yessios, as a professor at Ohio State University for many years, understands the academic environment’s influence on adoption.

“From what we know, the Mac has always been popular with individual academic users…this is faculty and students that buy computers for themselves,” Yessios remarks. “However, when academic units buy computers for their labs they have favored PCs because they have been significantly cheaper.” Yessios further remarks that universities, however, have been on a trend to maintain fewer and fewer labs and they expect students to have personal computers. This trend thus favors Macs, putting the costs and decisions in the hands of students themselves.

If the cost of a computer is the student’s burden then it tilts the field in the direction of Apple as long as the software choices are there. solidThinking, Inc., and its parent company Altair, both said affirmative remarks about the Mac in the CAD space, noting that because solidThinking is truly cross-platform adoption of their industrial design application is rising in colleges. James Scapa, CEO of Altair, remarked: “We always said that if anyone ever put a great UI [user interface] on top of Unix they could win this space.” “That’s what Apple did so let’s see how it plays out now.” Scapa’s comments reflects on the history of Unix in research and academia, a connection with very strong ties.

But it may be Autodesk, the giant player in the market, with its very strong presence in colleges around the world, who may have the best feel for college computing environments. “You know the Mac has always been the dominant device on college campuses,” says Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk. “I think as you move forward I think the change is that people now have an expectation of also their iPhones and iPads being very capable computing devices and doing more and more stuff there.”

The Cloud: Apple, the Mac and iOS

And when Bass speaks about iPhones and iPad’s doing more and more stuff…the way that work gets accomplished is often with the assistance of the cloud. As we noted in our second article, “The iPad: How the CAD/3D industry is being changed,” the cloud and the iPad are partners in a changing computational paradigm. But how does this affect CAD and 3D? We asked some of our CEOs.

James Scapa, CEO of Altair, reminded us that Altair has been doing cloud computing for years. “Altair has, for years, been a leader in grid computing technology which is a key enabler of cloud computing, since it provides the underlying scheduling, load balancing, provisioning and data management.”

Scapa too sees the iPad as a natural partner for the cloud. “The iPad provides a natural means for users to orchestrate and access all of their work,” says Scapa, “from wherever they are.”  He further notes that in the world of engineering the “iPad provides a great opportunity for engineers to stay connected to their projects.” In Scapa’s view engineering has many benefits when the iPad gets paired up with access to remote data and web services.

“There is no doubt we will see many engineering specific apps emerge for iPad,” says Scapa. “from simple special purpose calculators to project query and reporting tools. The iPad is sort of a gateway product from Apple which can draw new users into the Apple community and further the adoption of OS X.”

The iPad becomes ‘gateway’ to OS X because in essence it is a truly effective computing device when paired with the cloud. This is the same view Carl Bass shared in his interview with us. For Autodesk, the cloud plus iPad conjures up new types of workflows. Autodesk’s project Neon, a network cloud-based rendering service, is one example.

Sean Flaherty, CEO of Nemetschek Vectorworks, said that he sees the cloud as an important part of the future of the CAD industry but that many people first think of the cloud in the wrong way. “I think they are often thinking of application virtualization,” he says, “such as running Vectorworks through a web connection. This certainly has a place–we are seeing this particularly in the government sector–but [it] isn’t a disruptive technology that will fundamentally change the way people work.”

Flaherty doesn’t see the cloud as meaning the end of desktop applications as we know them today. “I do think people will be moving towards a mix of applications and services that use the cloud to keep everything working together,” he notes.

This of course brings up Apple’s iCloud service that is scheduled for fall of 2011. Apple’s iCloud presents a particular type of cloud computing paradigm. Flaherty notes that the first wave of cloud applications work in concert with your desktop applications–similarly to how a web service like network rendering may work. Your rendering app would be able to upload render tasks and these would be handled on web application servers.

Apple’s iCloud is somewhat different. “Apple with iCloud is now promoting your iCloud account as your “master” account over all your desktop and mobile identities,” says Flaherty. And this works in conjunction with the iPad. “The iPad is creating a new class of authoring apps,” says Flaherty, “that do lightweight edits to heavyweight data, instead of the traditional viewer versus editor split.”

Flaherty is not alone in seeing iCloud offering a fresh approach. Viktor Varkonyi, CEO of BIM leader Graphisoft, noted that Apple’s iCloud does offer a fresh approach to cloud utilization. “Putting key parts of the business logic into the cloud–as offered by the iCloud API–combined with thick clients,” says Varkonyi, “can produce hybrid solutions that combine the best of both worlds, easily beating monolithic systems in both performance and quality of user experience.”

next page: Apple in CAD/3D: Opportunities and Room for Improvement

Apple in CAD/3D: Opportunities and Room for Improvement

While Apple is extremely well poised to both shape and benefit from the various interactions between the tablet and the cloud, the company has many areas for where there is room for improvement.

To truly embrace the engineering market James Scapa, CEO of Altair, feels that Apple needs to strengthen their sales and support. “For Apple to succeed in the engineering sector it will need more than a great platform.” “They will need to work with the IT groups of the companies in this space and they will need to support the ISVs as well,” he adds. “HP, IBM, Sun, Intel and Microsoft, to their credit,” he continues, “have always understood and embraced this.”

Apple however has never been strong in supporting the enterprise and trends like those happening in University computing may continue to shape Apple’s thinking about letting computing eventually drift further into the control of the end user or consumer. In fact, they may indeed be encouraging it.

Varkonyi remarked, “I also see a trend–led by Apple–of complex professional systems shifting toward a more ‘consumer product’ approach, meaning simple and easy to understand user interfaces and interactions.” Varkonyi sees this trend as good as it can help BIM vendors bring the benefits of BIM to a much wider audience.

Both Scalpa’s and Varkonyi’s points are very valid. Apple can improve in supporting businesses and enterprises and the company does do so every year. At the same time Apple continues to excel at simplifying the complex. Eventually working at both ends of the problem Apple may, one day, find itself clearly within a dominant position within the engineering space.

Closing Comments

So where does this leave us now? What is the “state of Apple” in CAD and 3D? Our graph on the first page clearly indicates an unstoppable force in the Cupertino company.

One of the more remarkable aspects of that graph is it is clear that there is significant headroom for momentous growth on the Mac. While fourfold growth is nothing to sneeze at in a ten year span, it doesn’t keep pace with Apple’s remarkable revenue picture, largely driven by iOS.

Will iCloud be the one force that binds them all, eventually pushing Mac adoption at the growth rates seen by its sibling devices? This is a key question that remains to be seen.

Part of the challenge for the CAD and 3D industry in looking at the influence of Apple is trying to figure out how it’s many innovations fit into their defined modes of doing things. And this is what is so tricky for the rest of the industry. Apple doesn’t care much about previous modes of doing things–they break those modes by defining new ones.

And if that picture is one that is perennially difficult to paint, then perhaps the best resting point for one’s understanding is to simply settle on what is apparently obvious: Apple is working at synthesizing its old platform with its new one, its old era device with its new era mobility devices… via the cloud!

Editor’s Note

This is the third article in our 2011 State of Apple in CAD/3D Industries special series reports, corresponding to SIGGRAPH 2011. We hope you enjoyed this article as our fourth in the series will delve into technical details behind the Mac platform as it applies to CAD and 3D. Again, we will be hearing from some of the world’s leading experts.

Voices in this article include: Sean Flaherty, CEO, Nemetschek Vectorworks; Carl Bass, CEO, Autodesk; James Scapa, CEO, Altair; Viktor Varkonyi, CEO Graphisoft; Bob McNeel, President of McNeel and Associates; and Dr. Chris Yessios, President of AutoDesSys. Yes, if you might have noticed, we changed the planned title for this article from “5 CEO’s….et cetera to our current title of “Top CEOs…” At the last minute we ended up with more input and we wanted to share it.

We hope you have enjoyed this third article and look forward to feedback. Post below or email us.