Following SolidWorks World 2011, lots of people have been writing about the cool stuff they saw on the show floor and in the sessions, myself included. Today, I am not going to talk about cool. I am going to talk about impressive. And what impressed me most on the floor at SolidWorks World was COMPETITION… what I mean is the openness of the SolidWork’s management team to openly allow add-on solutions that in some cases compete with Solidwork’s own products.
I counted at least 5 vendors offering PDM and PLM solutions on the floor at the conference. Again, myself included. I point this out because it’s something you would never see at a PTC or Siemens conference – trust me, I know.
So why did SolidWorks welcome competitors at their biggest party of the year? Because they believe in open business and open technology, and in providing their users with choice and options, even if it doesn’t appear to be in SolidWorks’ short term best interests. For this, I tip my hat to SolidWorks. They bet on the value of a strong community, and it has paid off in market share and profitable revenue growth.
This isn’t new for Dassault SolidWorks. They changed design and the expectations of designers forever by making complex design tasks easy and approachable, and by building a world-wide community of users, partners and 3rd party software developers who have collaborated for over a decade on how to continuously improve, incrementally, on the design process.
The announcement of DraftSight, Dassault’s open 2D CAD product, is the latest example of the company’s commitment to community and open technology. We were fortunate to have a booth next to DraftSight in the exhibition hall, and I saw first-hand the steady stream of visitors and had the opportunity to speak with several very enthusiastic Dassault employees.
Why all the excitement? Because when you remove barriers to entry, create a participative community and empower people to strive for excellence, you create passion. That’s what Dassault is doing with DraftSight, what Aras is doing with Innovator, and what so many other innovative companies are doing today with alternative business models. And it is really fun to watch.