Graebert Announces ARES for Enterprise—Modern DWG CAD for Large Organizations

Graebert of Berlin has announced at its Annual Meeting for developers and key users, a new ARES for Enterprise product and solutions offering. The purpose of the new product is to offer a premium version that meets the needs of larger enterprises for administration, deployment and private server environments.

ARES for Enterprise

ARES for Enterprise addresses the needs of larger organizations facing deployment challenges for larger numbers of CAD users, across both desktop, mobile and cloud. Graebert’s Trinity of CAD solutions offering innovative simplified user licensing, enabling users to easily work across numerous devices and operating systems.

01 – ARES for Enterprise provides new abilities for large customers to host ARES Kudo on private AWS servers or on intranet Windows servers, offering customers security requirements that exceed the public cloud.

Key features of the new enterprise specific offering include:

Higher Control for Administrators

• Cloud Storage Services Admin Control — admins can now control which cloud services are allowed by an organization, selecting from major names in cloud storage, from Google, Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, Onshape, Trimble Connect, and others.
• Mobile Device Management (MDM) — admins now have MDM solutions support
• Control User Capabilities — admins can restrict some features based on the policies of an organization. Examples include not allowing export to PDF, or the ability to share drawings with a link for online viewing.

Deployment Facilitation

• Support for Single Sign-on (SSO) — the enterprise offering allows for authentication via Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (other SSO providers may follow).
• Count of Monthly Active Users — instead of paying a license for each user, ARES for Enterprise allows organizations to pay only for the users who have been using the product at least once per month. Enterprise customers pay for a capacity o monthly active users and will not pay for inactive users. This allows deploying to a “pool of users” without knowing the exact needs of each of them.

Integration with IT Environment

• ARES Kudo on Private AWS — Earlier in the year Graebert was among first companies to receive the Industrial Software Competency from Amazon Web Services (AWS). ARES for Enterprise customers will be offered the option to run ARES Kudo, the company’s cloud version, on a private AWS environment managed by Graebert for their exclusive needs. Additional costs would apply based on required capacities. This option is therefore only required to meet specific security requirements.
• ARES Kudo on Internal Server — ARES for Enterprise also supports the option to run ARES Kudo on an internal Windows server behind an organization’s firewall. This would allow ARES Kudo to run offline on an intranet (browser-based network not connected to the Internet). Additional costs would apply based on customer requirements.

These new enterprise features will greatly aid large companies looking to deploy DWG-based CAD solutions. The DWG format has been the lingua franca of the CAD industry to produce and share technical drawings for decades. Millions of professionals use such software in a variety of industries, from AEC, manufacturing, engineering, plant and utility, infrastructure, et cetera. This represents billions of DWG files saved over the years.

To learn more about ARES-based CAD solutions go here.

Architosh Analysis and Commentary

Graebert is one of several companies that are challenging Autodesk’s popular AutoCAD directly, with compatible DWG file format software. But their challenges go far beyond just matching features and battling on price and licensing typology. There is a growing demand for viewing and editing DWG files, according to companies like Graebert.

“DWG-editing is entering a new era,” said Cedric Desbordes, Sales and Marketing Executive, Graebert. “For each desktop user currently using CAD software we estimate that there could be easily three to five times more mobile and cloud users. This represents tens of millions of potential new users,” continues Desbordes.

These ideas are not unheard of here at Architosh. Corel, also a Graebert licensee and partner, has described many of its larger enterprise-sized customers in similar terms, where the occasional CAD enters specific segments of workflows touching on mainstay CAD workflows. A good example is technical illustrators for enterprise manufacturing companies, companies like Boeing and John Deere, for example. Such companies need to enable light-weight CAD users to gain access to CAD data and often times that person is on a factory floor or marketing boardroom.

Graebert’s Trinity of CAD solution now covers all device types and scales from the personal to the larger enterprise customer, with flexible and powerful licensing and now powerful enterprise options for deployment and admin control.