Elting Mechanical Enterprises

SolidWorks 2010 showed some of the future plans that Dassault Systemes has for cloud computing. The thought being that CAD software would no longer be platform dependent and therefore the designer would no longer have to deal with performance problems related to drivers, OS issues, etc. Okay, I'm all for more stability and better performance. What concerns me is something far more sinister may be in the works.

Dassault Systemes is talking about how with their PLM software, CATIA users would not even have files stored on their workstation but rather, the CAD data would be stored on Dassault's remote servers. Instead of "open", there would be "search", no saving only "publish". This concept of having Dassault being in charge of maintaining my CAD data is frankly, more than a bit unnerving. But a more serious issue is related to the defense work that I do for some of my clients. I know this will "not fly" with the DoD.

But aside from security issues, the main issue I have is since we will no longer have CAD software to install on our workstations, what keeps Dassault from blocking a user from logging onto their servers? This would also force users to maintain subscriptions or jeopardize their access and use of their CAD data. I see a storm coming in the form of cloud computing.