The news just broke this morning that Autodesk has acquired some assets of HSMWorks Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) software.
This is really getting many in manufacturing industry excited on Twitter as this was the perceived gap in the manufacturing software portfolio of Autodesk. For those not aware of what CAM is, it is the machining, milling, and CNC machine programming portion of manufacturing and an integral part to the manufacture and design of many manufactured parts.
Our Autodesk CEO Carl Bass is a user of CAD and CAM at his own personal workshop, where he makes many different things from amazing custom furniture to creative products like complex geometrical sculptured dishes, lamps, and more. Yes, our CEO not only uses our Autodesk software himself, but makes things and has for over 20 years which provides him as CEO a very unique perspective for our software portfolio and the practical usage and workflow.
“Autodesk intends to integrate the HSMWorks technology with its industry leading software and cloud services for manufacturing, and will make current HSMWorks products available for purchase and HSMXpress available as a free download. Existing SolidWorks customers using HSMWorks will continue to receive support and product updates.”
More Details in the Press Releases: http://bit.ly/QG5wnY and from HSMWorks site at http://bit.ly/PmZlAN
Cheers,
Shaan
Carl does indeed make things.
http://labs.blogs.com/its_alive_in_the_lab/2012/03/carl-bass-steve-jobs.html
There was no perceived gap. There was a gap and there still is a gap until HSMWorks technology is fully integrated into Autodesk products.
Then you have this very serious mindset problem that many in the machining job shop business won’t go along with:
“I’d say two to three years from now, every one of our products will be used online. The only way to use them will be online.”
http://www.3dcadtips.com/will-autodesk-products-all-be-used-online/
For years Autodesk has tried to buy a CAM company and for whatever reason has never completed the deal. SolidCAM is one such company that Autodesk almost purchased and then backed out.
There are plenty of ignorant Autodesk fanboi’s on Twitter who think CAM is a tiny market. The fact is that CAM sells CAD. Not having a CAM product has very badly hurt Autodesk sales for a long time. Purchasing HSMWorks is a step in the right direction. I hope I had something to do with getting Carl Bass and others at Autodesk to finally wake up and do something about this long standing problem even if I’ll never get proper credit for it.
Jon Banquer
San Diego, CA
CADCAM Technology Leaders group on LinkedIn