So our goal is to provide a thriving and growing ecosystem of tools that enable our customers to be more innovative and ultimately more competitive. CAD tools must deliver value to customers by helping provide greater innovation in the products our customers bring to market. We think that SOLIDWORKS 2016 is another great step towards that goal with over 360 new features and enhancements, most of them customer-requested.

While today our customers have chosen the Windows desktop as the preferred platform for engineering software, we see a future in which users will need CAD tools on multiple connected platforms. As we look ahead, we are already leveraging new technologies, such as the cloud, but ultimately it’s about customer choice. Are you ready with your data residing in the cloud? Are you comfortable with the idea of paying for software as you use it—if capital allocation is an issue—or do you like the concept of ownership? We don’t want to make those decisions for our customers.

So looking ahead, we won’t force our customers to adapt to a technology with which they are not yet comfortable. We’re not jumping into the cloud because it’s the “cool” thing or because everyone else is doing it. We’re doing it because performance improvements in the future will be driven by bandwidth and easily accessible shared resource—not desktop computing power. Investing in modern architectures that will improve the productivity and collaboration of our users is what drives our development initiatives now and in the future.

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