Dassault Strengthens SOLIDWORKS Links to the Cloud

At 3DEXPERIENCE World 2023 in Nashville, Dassault Systemes announced that its venerable SOLIDWORKS product would have even stronger links to the companies 3DExperiencePlatform. Starting in July 2023, every new seat of SOLIDWORKS will include cloud services. 

“You can take anything that you have open and save it to the platform. When you save it, it goes up to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. It’s all out of the box – no overhead. It’s simple and turnkey,” said Gian Paolo Bassi, Executive Vice President of 3DEXPERIENCE Works. 

This was the first live 3DEXPERIENCE event since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. 

In addition to cloud services access, SOLIDWORKS users will also be able to easily publish and share designs from SOLIDWORKS to other partners and stakeholders via the cloud, even those without access to the Dassault products. 

“Everyone with a SOLIDWORKS license can share for review any 3D design with anyone in the world, without any license, without any installation. The cloud is now part of each new seat and you can share everything you do with everyone in the world in the most convenient way,” Bassi said.

Users will be able to share their designs with anyone via the cloud, including partners that do not use SOLIDWORKS or the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. 

At the event, Dassault provided an overview of the company's commitment to designing for sustainability within the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, and the expanded use of artificial intelligence (AI) to help guide design and manage product and simulation data.

In addition, the company provided more details on updates to the SOLIDWORKS 2023 release, which was announced back in October 2022

According to Brian Zias of 3DEXPERIENCE Works, those include smarter large assembly performance (which makes it easier to manage large assemblies via automatic lightweight mode); automatic resolution of mate breaks; the ability to group like corners together when generating frames; smarter drawing views; improved magnetic mates in assemblies; faster BOM creation; and enhancements to PDF extraction. 

The ability to link to cloud services will not only allow users to easily share models, but Zias explained that they will have access to advanced simulation capabilities in the cloud.

Traditional SOLIDWORKS users have largely not made the transition to the cloud-based 3DEXPERIENCE platform, so the offer of free cloud access is likely a way for Dassault to help accelerate adoption. 

The event also kicked off with a keynote speech by Ring founder and CEO (and SOLIDWORKS user) Jamie Siminoff, as well as presentations by Dassault CEO Bernard Charles, SOLIDWORKS CEO Manish Kumar and Suchit Jain, vice president of strategy and business development.