CAD and PDM in the cloud shouldn’t be so dang hard for engineering teams and the IT teams that support them. At Converge, we bridge the gap between engineering and IT teams to save you precious time, people, equipment resources, and ultimately money. This blog explores several options and advantages to consider how the latest CAD in the cloud technologies and “as a service” offerings from Converge can simplify your company’s adoption of cloud solutions.
What Are My Options To Support a Remote Workforce?
If the last two years have taught us anything, it would be that we live in an ever-changing global economy, and only the companies that can adapt and evolve will survive. No one could have guessed how a global pandemic would forever change our work environments making a remote workforce the norm. Fortunately, our team has spent the previous 10+ years as the only SOLIDWORKS solution partner perfecting a hosted SOLIDWORKS PDM solution that helped many customers and us through a very challenging time. In 2018, largely due to our “cloud first” approach and value-added cloud services, Dassault Systemes authorized us to join the authorized SOLIDWORKS “Value Added Resellers” or VARs supporting traditional SOLIDWORKS desktop products as well as the 3DEXPERIENCE® Software as a Service (SaaS) platform. The pandemic accelerated the need for companies to find solutions that could support remote collaboration. As a result, today, we are the only SOLIDWORKS VAR offering multiple cloud options for SOLIDWORKS customers.
Do IT Resource Constraints Limit Your Engineering Capabilities?
Years of deploying managed cloud-hosted PDM solutions highlighted a service and expertise gap between the engineering and IT functions of a business. More often than not, customers seeking a PDM solution suffer from some IT or administration resource constraint preventing them from implementing PDM. Long before we were Converge, our EpiGrid customers looked to us for IT, SOLIDWORKS Support, and PDM administration services to supplement the value they were not getting from their VAR. Our ability to bridge the gap between the engineering and IT functions of a business became central to our organization’s value prop.
How Do You Optimize and Administer Your CAD Environment?
The opportunity to work with and directly support SOLIDWORKS users has taught us a great deal more about what services and solutions SOLIDWORKS users were looking for in addition to just SOLIDWORKS products and subscription support. Customers we engaged with not only suffered from IT constraints but also with the administration and optimization of the CAD environment and workflow. As a result, we expanded our service offering to include Comprehensive CAD managed services so that customers could entrust us with the management of their CAD environment. Together with our EpiGrid Managed Cloud and SOLIDWORKS product support, these services create a unique service offering to directly address the most common IT and administration pain points of most CAD environments.
How Does “as a Service” Translate to Added Value?
In 2019 we introduced the concept of “Software Hosting as a Service.” A variation of the common acronym “SaaS” (Software as a Service), SHaaS as we referred to it then, has evolved into the foundation of our “as a Service” business approach. Typical business practice for IT managed service providers, the “as a service” approach wraps the value-added support and management services around all the software, hardware, and network components of the solution. Combining our CAD managed services, Managed Hybrid Cloud and SOLIDWORKS products constitute our industry-first Solidworks Hosted as a Service. “SHaaS,” as we refer to it today, has become the central offering in a series of new “as a Service” solutions centered around cloud-hosted, fully managed SOLIDWORKS CAD environments.
Are You Looking for the PDM “Easy Button?”
Over the years, we have built our success around cloud-hosted PDM environments where we will continue to be the gold standard. However, we are always looking for ways to leverage our experiences to simplify and accelerate the adoption of cloud solutions. Our new SOLIDWORKS PDM as a Service (SW-PDMaaS) is the PDM easy button. Inclusive of managed cloud hosting, Axis Vault PDM implementation, and SOLIDWORKS CAD managed services, this new solution ensures customers an immediate functional PDM solution without the typical implementation costs and administration pains.
The SOLIDWORKS You Love, in the Cloud.
A popular request that comes up frequently is SOLIDWORKS in the cloud. Our new SOLIDWORKS Desktop as a Service (SW-DaaS) is your fully managed personal SOLIDWORKS desktop in the cloud. This solution boasts Windows 10 OS, dedicated resources, and Nvidia GPUs to give you the typical workstation performance on any device anywhere. Each desktop includes SOLIDWORKS licensing, EpiGrid comprehensive managed IT services, and Converge CAD managed services, guaranteeing a fully managed and optimized cloud desktop experience.
We Believe “Cloud First” Means Putting Our Customers First
In the SOLIDWORKS Value Added Resellers landscape, we stand alone with a “cloud first” approach and various cloud offerings to help you work smarter and not harder. We are excited to share what we have learned along our 10+ year journey that has made us subject matter experts in developing and deploying cloud solutions for SOLIDWORKS to save you time, resources, and money. We’ve done the cloud research and optimization for you, so you don’t have to start your journey to the cloud from scratch. Over the coming weeks, we hope you follow along as we introduce more details about our “as a Service” managed Cloud Hosted CAD solutions.
