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December 11, 2001
Following last week's announcement by Autodesk VP Robert Kross that he was creating a team to develop Autodesk's own kernel based on ACIS but independent of Spatial, I asked Mike Payne, CEO of Spatial, for his side of the story.
Mr. Payne does not understand Autodesk's move, and expects it to fail because components are commodities, and shouldering the added costs to develop them in-house seems to be a poor business decision. He says he speaks from experience, that at one time he was "in their [Autodesk's] shoes." While at PTC, he helped develop Pro/E's kernel from scratch. After that expensive and time-consuming experience (back then, it was the only option), he says he vowed to never again do that. Thus, in the development of SolidWorks, components were available, and he specified ParaSolid. Contrary to the opinion of Joe Costello (CEO of think3), Mr Payne says "no one should invest a nickel in developing a geometry kernel" because it is too hard and too expensive.
Mr. Payne commented that some of Autodesk's statements contravened the confidentiality clause in the ACIS contract inherited by Dassault (when it purchased Spatial last year). He has problems with "liberal wording" by Mr Kross, such as that Autodesk "bought the source" and that Autodesk "is the largest ACIS customer."
So, did Autodesk purchase a perpetual license to the source code? Spatial says it is the exclusive owner of the ACIS intellectual property. Therefore, Autodesk has no right to expose the ACIS API to a third-party, except through SAT (ASCII file export) or through a license. While data translation won't be a problem, "interoperability with third-parties may become a problem." Mr Payne speculates Autodesk will have to write another layer for its API to prevent third-party developers from accessing ACIS directly.
So, was Autodesk the largest ACIS customer? Autodesk represented less than 10% of revenues for Spatial, in part because Spatial has signed up 400 new customers in the last year. (There are currently 1.4 million seats of ACIS-enabled software on the market, not include the Autodesk seats, or seats that use other Spatial products. Just 25% of revenue is derived from the traditional CAD market.)
Autodesk is ignoring the fact that the highly-successful SolidWorks is based on a third-party kernel.
Although Autodesk says it is hiring a hot-shot team of kernel developers, Spatial thinks Autodesk is hiring the wrong people; many of the new hires have experience with solid modelers other than ACIS who won't understand how ACIS is put together. Instead of making Inventor a bigger success, Mr. Payne thinks this move to independence will cost Autodesk customers in increased kernel-related bugs and cost Autodesk shareholders in lowered earnings/share due to the huge development price. Mr Payne gave an example of the kernel's complexity, describing a Boolean bug that took nearly six months to fix correctly. The closer you get to the user interface, he said, the easier the bugs are to fix.
One Autodesk complaint was that ACIS v7 was delivered a month after Inventor v5 shipped. Spatial calls this a non sequitur; they say ACIS v7 was delivered on-schedule. ACIS v6.3 emphasized bug-fixing, while ACIS v7 contained every request made by Autodesk.
So, why did Autodesk cut lose from Spatial? "I can't imagine why." Mr Payne says Mr. Kross never indicated he was dissatisfied with ACIS. Mr Payne stated he is willing to publicly debate Mr. Kross. Perhaps that could be a feature of next May's COFES meeting.
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see Autodesk's reaction to this article in "Autodesk Snaps at Spatial..."
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