Graebert Annual Meeting 2016—Introducing ‘Trinity’ of CAD

Once again I attended the Graebert Annual Meeting in Berlin, and this marks the third year Architosh has participated as part of a small CAD press corps. Like in previous years, the two-day event focused on a series of technology keynotes covering not only Graebert’s DWG CAD technology but also the software offerings from other third-party developers who are licensees of that technology.

We highlighted last year why this event is important to follow but it bears repeating again and it goes something like this: DWG is far from dead.

DWG isn’t just far from dead, it is evolving under non-Autodesk hands (and not just Graebert’s) in a way that is beginning to feel disruptive. But the innovative potential of the most famous (mostly) 2D CAD format isn’t guaranteed and much of it seems to depend on a careful reading of the tea leaves at events just like this one.

A Focus on Core Technology

Part of the reason why DWG’s disruptive potential isn’t guaranteed is because Graebert itself isn’t particularly interested in being disruptive itself but rather interested in growing out its licenses and OEM base. On some real level, Graebert would rather focus on providing the core technology to other companies who can choose to do the riskier disruptive work—like the folks at Onshape.

Onshape—which was at the event this year as well—provided its most compelling pitch deck in a series of slides that focused on today’s market demands for ‘Agile’ workflows. The argument was highly convincing, focused on time-to-market pressures and the not-always-obvious advantages of true collaborative workflows.

For Graebert the mission seems quite clear: develop the best DWG CAD platform technology and make it available on every platform and major mobile device. Then, aggressively license this technology in a highly flexible manner to software OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and seek out blue ocean markets.

A Focus on Global Expansion

Part of Graebert’s growth story is geographical expansion and that began years ago. A core expansion domain is in Japan, where an OEM (original equipment manufacturer) in JDraf Co. Ltd. has met with remarkable success. So strong has been their acceleration that Graebert partnered with its parent company, Computer System Technology Co., to take a 50 percent participation in the company. (see image 02) This is an interesting acquisition and it is unclear if CST will eventually allow the German CAD company to acquire more than half of its promising subsidiary. That question is really not significant at this point in time. What is important is that from this point forward the partnership will be known as Graebert Japan and will continue to seek market share growth against Autodesk’s AutoCAD, the DWG leader in Japan. This means the ARES branded CAD platform will be instantly applied to the Japan CAD market and aims to take leadership away from US-based Autodesk.

How does Graebert Japan see that happening?

There are a couple of factors at play advantaging ARES Commander in the Japanese CAD market. One factor is the availability of a full-fledged DWG CAD system on mobile platforms, particularly iOS but Android is also covered. Another factor is a superior licensing model that gives companies flexibility. Both ‘perpetual’ and ‘subscription’ licensing options exist and Graebert’s licensing kit just keeps getting better and better every year. In fact, Graebert’s new licensing system may, in fact, be the best licensing system we have ever seen by any company in the CAD or 3D market. Yet, let’s forget about how good and flexible it really is. The big thing is Japanese companies, according to conversations with Yoshiyuki Nagao and his colleagues during the event, do not want to be forced into the subscription-only licensing models that Autodesk is pushing forward with.

Finally, another factor that advances Graebert is simply its price advantage, offering a native DWG CAD system that goes more or less head-to-head with full AutoCAD for the price of AutoCAD LT.

These advantages are currently working in a very mature CAD market. CST of Japan (JDraf’s parent company) quite easily broke into three of the top five largest construction firms, unseating rivals. Now Graebert hopes to take a similar formula to other high-growth, high-opportunity markets. One such market is India but Brazil is another opportunity for the company and its OEM partners.

The other big question for expansion is the US market. While the company acknowledges going up against AutoCAD in the US is extremely challenging, the global number one market for CAD is rich with opportunity if Graebert can unseat AutoCAD LT licenses in particular. For the same price as AutoCAD LT, Graebert’s ARES solutions are offering quite a bit more, especially with the new Trinity technologies.

The Big News—The “Trinity of CAD”

Graebert’s announcement that it was offering the first DWG CAD solution that worked across desktop, mobile, and cloud—or what it calls the ‘Trinity of CAD’—is striking on two major fronts. The first is the ambition to have a single user experience that is tied together by is new licensing technology. A single license gives the user access to all three access platforms (desktop, mobile device or cloud) across various operating systems and on multiple computers.

This means a user can have a system at work (desktop Windows for example), a system at home (iMac for example), an iPad for mobile work, and still also access their work with ARES Kudo from any browser (say Chrome for Linux on the factory floor). When a user wants to move their license over to another machine, they simply log out of the ARES Licensing portal through a browser. Then they log-in on another machine they want to use to activate the license on that machine.

While the licensing technologies are a thing of beauty so too is the direction with the unified UI/UX treatment across all three access platforms (desktop, mobile, cloud). The admiration of the ‘dark’ UI on the ARES Kudo cloud app last year was something we had shared with the company and even suggested it would be nice to see it on the desktop, a la, the dark theme on the Mac version of AutoCAD. So it was nice to see this new dark color scheme being used to “harmonize the look and feel of the three products,” as Graebert put it during talks.

Not everyone likes the dark UI theme, however. Many veteran DWG CAD users prefer the lighter UI themes so Graebert is offering users the choice with ARES Commander. That’s fine but bear in mind on the mobile apps the dark theme has a purpose: it cuts down on battery consumption as darkening the screen always helps you preserve your energy use with mobile devices. From this perspective, one can say that the ‘Trinity’ themed dark UI is much more a reflection of contemporary computing culture, where users’ lives are predominantly oriented towards mobile devices and the cloud.

Additionally, OEM’s too have the choice to adopt or not adopt the Trinity dark UI theme. In fact, with ARES Kudo in particular, both OEMs and enterprise-scale users have the choice to “skin the app” and much more (we will delve deeper into ARES Kudo in another article).

To recap the point of Trinity is to converge three distinct solutions into a coherent, unified user experience applied to the single user or the enterprise customer. ARES Commander 2017 forms the heart of the desktop strategy, where the heaviest CAD loads are undertaken, on Windows, macOS, or Linux operating systems. ARES Touch 2017 is the mobile device solution and is capable of not just viewing, annotating, measuring and editing DWG files but actually creating them too. For most users, ‘field-based’ uses will prevail. ARES Kudo is the cloud solution and focuses on sharing and collaboration in addition to viewing and editing of DWG CAD files. In many ways, ARES Kudo has the chance to develop into something bigger than itself—major collaboration platform. (more on that later).

We will cover more details on all three of these ARES 2017 products in separate reports, but for now, let’s recap on some of the OEM highlights as well.

next page: Graebert Partners Advance Their Solutions

Graebert Partners Advance Their Solutions

Graebert’s OEM partners were also in attendance at this year’s Annual Meeting. Like last year these included Dassault Systèmes (Solidworks), Onshape, and Corel. Other OEM’s included specific industry solutions talked about on the second day in Developer Workshops. Finally, JDraf Co. Ltd., one of the major OEM partners, is now officially Graebert Japan, as we just discussed on the previous page.

Dassault DraftSight

Dassault’s Andreas Kulik, who is director of Product Portfolio & Business Development for SolidWorks, led the OEM talks by reviewing the eight-year history they have with Graebert and what DraftSight means to his company. Kulik told the audience that DraftSight’s original mission was to address the millions of legacy 2D DWG CAD files. “But we found out,” he said, “that SolidWorks users actually [still] create 2D drawings.” (see image 04)

Dassault Systèmes has a massive DraftSight user base, now at 1.3 million users. Kulik stated that DraftSight is second in the CAD market only to AutoCAD with over 450,000 companies with deployed seats. Dassault is clearly Graebert’s largest OEM partner and Dassault’s mission with DraftSight is to develop it to its fullest potential as part of the Dassault 3DExperience. DraftSight 2017 will be available in early November and ships in three versions: DraftSight, DraftSight Professional, and DraftSight Enterprise.

DraftSight is a completely free product and is limited to 2D DWG CAD operations only. As a professional grade 2D CAD system, it is targeted as a drafting solution for AEC professionals (architects, engineers, contractors) as well as general designers, educators, and hobbyists. The solution runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems. However, the macOS and Linux versions are technically labeled as beta.

DraftSight Professional, on the other hand, is available only for Windows and supports numerous features not available in the free version. Such features include the Dassault 3DExperience GEOVIA, Delmia, SolidWorks Electrical, PDM Connectors. PDF underlay and Microsoft DGN import are also not supported in the free version. DraftSight Enterprise Pack essentially comprises adding enterprise level tools to the mix such as a network licensing tool, deployment wizard, and technical support by telephone and email.

I asked Kulik why the Mac version of DraftSight continues to be in beta mode after years on the market. He simply said: “come see us at DraftSight Live in February,” implying that something affecting the Mac version (and presumably the Linux version) would be announced. Kulik told the audience at Graebert’s Annual Meeting that DraftSight has grown so large and is so strategic to the company that this year they will have a DraftSight Live event held within SolidWorks World 2017 itself.

CorelCAD

Corel also announced its new CorelCAD 2017 product. Corel is a key major OEM partner for Graebert offering a targeted CAD solution that integrates into CorelDRAW and CorelDRAW Technical Suite. Corel sells a product called Lattice3D Studio CAD, an add-on for Technical Suite that enables the reading of 3D CAD assembly formats from leading MCAD solutions. The integrations between CorelDRAW and the CAD world are significant. CorelCAD is meant to serve two clear markets that play to Corel’s core strengths.

The first of these markets is access to legacy DWG CAD files (or even new ones) in markets that need to produce technical documents, such as enterprise manufacturing clients, using Corel’s well-regarded technical drawing apps. These CAD files can then be exported to native CorelDRAW or CorelDESIGNER (.cdr and .des) file formats—a unique feature of CorelCAD. For users in both enterprise and SMBs who use CorelDRAW and CorelDRAW Technical Suite for technical documents (eg: automobile or electronics user manuals) CorelCAD offers a unique advantage for both the technical documents department user and the engineer or technician who is designing, engineering, or creating the manufactured products that need to be documented.

Another market where Corel is seeing strength with CorelCAD is in AEC users in North America and Europe. Home builders, contractors, architects and engineers who have been DWG-based CAD systems for years have taken up CorelCAD, according to Corel Executive, Klaus Vossen. While the first market defined above is centered around Windows nearly exclusively (CorelDRAW is a Windows only app), Vossen told me in a discussion that the Mac version is very popular amongst its AEC users. CorelCAD will also be deploying CorelCAD for iOS at some point in the future, again because of the popularity of Apple’s iOS devices in AEC markets.

Onshape

Lastly, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based, Onshape, spoke again this year but with a slightly different argument for their unique all-cloud MCAD platform. Once again Robert Minor gave the talk and spoke about how ‘Agile’ work methodology and the cloud is revolutionizing other disciplines. To Onshape it became a question of “why not product design?”

Onshape’s view is that traditional file-centric CAD and PDM don’t work for Agile. In today’s world speed and innovation are the key leverage drivers in business. Agile and the cloud solve these challenges. Minor put a slide with a quote from global business consulting firm, Aberdeen, stating that companies need to launch products faster than their rivals and they need to produce more innovative products. So how do companies meet those challenges at the design and engineering level?

Minor stated that the big blockers to meeting those challenges are the lack of collaboration and the inability to work effectively in teams. Citing SalesForce.com, Minor said today’s winners are the ones who can move quickly. You can’t move as quickly if you can’t move in true parallel. Traditional CAD is setup to work in serial fashion—you wait until others finish their work; you worry about where the latest version is (the single source of truth problem); you concern yourself about overwriting each other’s changes; and in the PDM world you have extra work with checkout, copy, check-in, syncing, and notifications.

Minor said with Onshape—which exist entirely in the cloud and is accessed through web browsers or dedicated iOS apps—there is never any waiting. Anyone can work on anything. It is impossible to overwrite each other’s changes (work); there are no checkouts, copies or check-ins needed. And entire teams of any size can work entirely in parallel.

Onshape isn’t a traditional OEM to for ARES Commander but rather the first OEM for ARES Kudo technology. Onshape Drawings uses ARES Kudo technology.

Other Comments About the Annual Meeting

This year’s event was held at the Bikini Berlin building, another fashionable area in Berlin near the central core close to Tiergarten and even closer to the Berlin Zoo. In fact, the so-called Monkey Bar, where we held some casual networking moments, overlooks the area in the zoo where the monkeys are, thus the name.

The Graebert Annual Event took place at Bikini Berlin, in City West near the Berlin core on the western edges of the Tiegarten. The mixed-use complex hosts fashion events with fashion retailing, hotel and restaurants with other business uses. 

Wilfried explained to me that the large building was one of the first big redevelopments after World War II. It was a garments industry building. According to the website, the ‘Bikinihaus’ was the core structure of the complex, a narrow post-war modern complex designed by architects Paul Schwebes and Hans Schoszberger. It runs 200 meters in length and was effectively given the bikini name by the locals in the 1950’s due to the open-sided story framed by columns on the second floor. To the locals these columns, so placed, separated the building into upper and lower parts, hence a ‘two-piece’ architecture. It reminded Berliners of the bare midriff in a bikini, the daring swimwear fashion which had taken the world by storm in the mid 20th century.

Here we are in the ‘teens’ decade of the 21st century. A hundred years past the first phase of two world wars, Berlin today feels ‘naturally’ hip, energized, and most of all open. All good tones for the melody of innovation and to the right beat for start-up culture. Graebert is hardly a start-up, but it has that energy and sense of momentum and its partners sense tremendous opportunity still left in DWG.

 

(disclosure: Graebert paid for air travel, hotel, and most meals during the event.)