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This week GrabCAD invited a group of PLM analysts and media to their first ever media event at their Cambridge, MA offices. GrabCAD claims to be “leading the Open Engineering movement, helping engineers get products to market faster by connecting people, content and technology.” They are best known for their GrabCAD community, where over 1.3 million engineers are actively sharing and collaborating on content from a wide range of authoring tools, primarily mechanical CAD data (currently numbering over 460,000 files). While the benefits of community are well known, some question just how much commerce you can do with public intellectual property.
Last November, GrabCAD announced Workbench, a solution focused on small group collaboration, again primarily for mechanical CAD data management. The successful beta test led to general availability in January 2014, and their planned summer release, which was the focus of this week’s event. From their start with CAD data management and collaboration, this new Workbench includes features very familiar to the product data management (PDM) veteran, like search, where used, BOM viewing, and configuration support. GrabCAD claims existing tools are for large teams, and make individuals less effective. According to GrabCAD, they focus on keeping the individual productive and efficient, which makes their collaborations that much more effective. GrabCAD claims that over 50,000 companies are using their Workbench solution, with user counts from one to hundreds (if they win a deal being contested now). As with many other cloud solutions, a very low price ($59 per user per month for the Pro version) makes it very easy for just about anyone to pull the trigger on the purchasing decision.
GrabCAD has forged relationships with leading CAD providers like Siemens PLM Software, Autodesk, and SolidWorks. At their event, GrabCAD announced a partnership with PTC to integrate Workbench with PTC Creo. On one hand, it makes sense. It is very difficult for large software providers to profitably serve very small customers. Their products are often too heavy, expensive, require IT skills and resources not available in such firms, and are complicated to provision and use. A focused solution like Workbench is ideal for small teams of casual users. As can be seen below, the user interface has big numbers and big buttons, making it pretty clear what to do.
GrabCAD Workbench User Interface
With this new release, GrabCAD is being pulled into the PDM space. People need PDM functionality to support product engineering, and their new, from the bottom up, approach could bring some fresh ideas to the market. Even though their focus is on the individual and small teams, larger companies are looking at the functionality and price point and realizing they can support some important use cases at low cost and risk. GrabCAD’s analyst and media event highlighted two small firms, Miselu, which showed a cool music instruction app (and hardware) for the iPad, and Paul Hammerstrom Design, a design consultancy with resources scattered around the country. Their excitement about their companies and Workbench was plain to see. We hope that as GrabCAD grows they can expand their capabilities while keeping that focus on the individual as part of a collective effort, while maintaining excitement in their rapidly growing user base.
