The story of 2009 will be what CADCAM company really puts their foot on the gas despite a bad economy. There will be a very strong emphasis on toolpath generation being able to use all the cores in a multi-core processor and on CAM systems supporting 64 bit OS’s. Here is an example of they type of thing you’re going to see from many CADCAM systems in 2009.
2008 winners are:
SolidCAM who went from a horrible user interface to a new user interface that will become the industry standard that others are measuered by. In addition, SolidCAM 2008 R12 had so many improvements it was mind-boggling. In 2009 if SolidCAM resolves the speed issue, adds toolpath editing, give the user a way to edit common machining operation parameters and makes the solid verification and backplot better it’s hard for me to imagine SolidCAM not being seen as the clear market leader running inside of SolidWorks and Autodesk Inventor.
Siemens Synchronous Technology.Siemens is leading the way away from history based modeling. History based modeling is badly dated and doesn’t work when you have to colaborate with others. History based modeling is a complete failure if you have to import non-native solids and make major modifications to them. Most history based CAD users end up having to totally remodel a non-native solid that needs major modification. Other products that offer Direct Modeling tools like SpaceClaim and CoCreate don’t have integrated CAM like NX 6 does and this makes their Direct Modeling tools just another incomplete solution.
As of right now Siemens NX 6 is the clear leader in trying to offer a more complete solution.
