Onshape is claimed to be the first and only full-cloud 3D CAD system that lets everyone on a design team work together using any web browser, phone, or tablet. Tell us more about this and also about its collaborative orientation.
Onshape was designed from scratch to meet the demands of how today's engineers and designers truly work. With traditional CAD, you are tied down to one licensed workstation - and it needs to be an expensive, powerful computer able to handle the compute-intensive and graphics-heavy requirements of installed CAD software. With Onshape, your CAD system is always with you. If you work remotely, you can call up your model on your laptop or tablet. You can make a quick edit on your phone while waiting at the airport. Our mobile apps for iPhone and Android give you full CAD functionality - it's not just a viewer.
Onshape is the first professional 3D CAD system specifically created for teams. Multiple people can work on the same model at the same time, seeing each other's changes as they happen - and they can go back to any stage in the design's history anytime. Teams no longer need to deal with the headaches of checking in and checking out files (and working only one person at a time) or worse, overwriting each other's work.
The Onshape 3D design service was in beta testing for a fairly long period. How many people used it during that time and how was the response?
Onshape's beta version launched last March and our commercial release was last December. In those nine months, we logged 400,000 design hours by users in more than 150 countries. In that same period, more than 4,000,000 modelling features were created. We don't release our customer numbers to the public, but the point of the beta phase was to prove that full-cloud CAD works. This was unventured territory and many industry experts were sceptical it was possible to run CAD smoothly over the Internet. The real proof came from our customers. Several of the products featured on our Customer Stories page were designed while Onshape was still in beta. That's the ultimate vote of confidence.
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