It’s been about 10 months since we released initial version of CAD Exchanger Cloud. Since then more than 4000 engineers from 100+ countries had a pleasure to be familiar with our product and the most generous of them advised us how to make our product better. Based on the collected feedback we rolled out 7 updates with variety of features: SolidWorks support, access control, folders support, drag’n’drop, engineering analysis tools etc.
And now we are finally ready to announce end of the Beta testing period and offer you production version of our product. Please enjoy.
On-premises vs Online
On-premises
The most encountered concern we faced sounded like this: ‘We are large enterprise. There is no way we put our data on the internet!’. It’s logical. We, just like our customers, are chained with tons of NDAs, that wouldn’t allow us to share anything other the internet. And it’s useless to say that cloud is safe, that your hard drive is the worst place to store sensitive data, that sooner or later you will still end up using clouds.
Corporations store data in-house. It’s state of the art. End of story.
Instead of trying to force our customers our vision we decided to adapt and made on-premises version of CAD Exchanger Cloud. What does it mean? Imagine, you can leverage all the benefits of Cloud CAD service: view 3D in a browser, use engineering analysis tools, share files and feedback with your colleagues, but everything is done offline. And the data is stored on your own servers, that are controlled and approved by your IT security.
Deployment of on-premises version inside corporate is relatively quick and easy process and we will be happy to assist you on that. Fill the form here and we will arrange a pilot for you.
Online
While on-premises is a best fit for large enterprises, regular online version will be a perfect match for small to medium organizations. Working out-of-the box, fully functional right after sign-up it will give you opportunity to try the best of our service for free. There are 2 plans available right now.
Free
Free version gives you full access to 3D view, conversions, basic engineering analysis tools (sectioning views, measurements, LoD management and more to come). The beauty of the free plan is that you can grant access to your projects to as many people as you want. All the features can be tested on the samples you will have right after sign-up or your own data. Free version will grant you 500 MB of cloud storage space, 50 MB per uploaded file, 10 projects and 10 conversions per month.
Pro
Pro plan is good for those who want to store lots of CAD data and includes 5 GB of storage space, 100 MB per uploaded file, unlimited number of projects and 100 conversions per month. To ensure your good piece of mind we provide technical support, already included to the plan. Pro plan is available for as low as $29 monthly.
Sign-up for free
IFC import support
Until recent times we were mainly oriented on MCAD and added support of 3D CAD formats, popular among mechanical engineers (SolidWorks, Parasolid, STEP). However, more and more people from Architecture and Construction asked us for support of AEC-friendly file formats.
Currently there is a strong dominance of Building Information Modeling concept, the integral part of which is IFC file format. IFC is a de-facto standard for data exchange between various AEC applications, like Revit, Tekla, BricsCAD, Archicad and so on. By enabling IFC in CAD Exchanger Cloud we granted users the opportunity to import 3D data from Revit (let’s say) and convert it to non-IFC friendly applications.
Even faster
As always, the main magic is hidden from the humans’ eyes. If you have followed us earlier and familiar with our company, you probably know that we are performance addicted. We hold 2 patents in the field of parallel programming and our technology boosts import and conversion operations by providing scalable parallel algorithms able to boost conversion times up to 16x.
What is parallel programming and parallelism at all? Parallelism allows to allocate heavy-weight computational operations (e.g. import or conversion of 3D CAD data) between cores of modern CPUs to leverage all available resources at the moment of time. A typical PC usually contains 2-4 cores and CAD Exchanger rides them all significantly improving the speed of the software.
OK, and what about the Cloud? CAD Exchanger Cloud is deployed on industry leading Azure infrastructure which consists of way more powerful nodes with numerous cores. By balancing the workload on those machines, we ensure top performance for our users. And now imagine that once the resources of the machine won’t be enough, additional node will be activated, whose resources will be also used to the maximum. And so on ad infinitum. This approach ensures supreme performance rapid input/output of large 3D files with thousands of elements.
Developers
We are software developers on the first place so we know what it takes to build a product. That’s how we know how to simplify your live, dear software engineers. Just like our main product CAD Exchanger Cloud API is available online and on premises. A few words about both options.
Online API
This option is suitable for those, who build online applications. It allows to integrate CAD Exchanger’s functionality in a few lines of code and leverage our servers to process the data. It’s convenient when your application is working with the certain type of data, let’s say meshes, while your end users keep feeding it B-Rep instead.
In addition to input/output capabilities, API allows to integrate 3D viewer into any web-page. Unlike embedded viewer, available out-of-the-box, you gain full control over the viewer: size, controls, camera types, zoom, pan, rotate options and so on.
As a matter of fact, the main value behind 3D file is its data: bill of materials, properties and other meta-data. Lots of applications rely their business logic on meta-data and CAD Exchanger Cloud allows to retrieve and manage it.
On-premises deployment
Back to the beginning of this blog post. Enterprises prefer to store the data in-house. Thus, online API is not suitable when you are working with large businesses.
That’s why we prepared CAD Exchanger Cloud SDK for those serving corporate customers. CAD Exchanger Cloud SDK is a set of JavaScript libraries, helping to quickly build autonomous browser based applications. As a result, you will have fully interned independent software, which would be installed on the customer’s hardware and work within customer’s firewall. No security concerns.
Just like online API, it will allow to import and convert 3D data, integrate 3D viewer and manage product structure and file properties.
Sign-up for free