IEN: What advances do you see in open standards and data sharing?

McCollough: While I hear a lot about open standards such as STEP, I think a more important development is the emergence of free toolkits developed by the vendors of CAD systems themselves.

AutoDesk Inventor, for example, makes available their Apprentice API so that Inventor files can be consumed by other applications. The Apprentice software is available for free. FeatureCAM (pictured) ships Apprentice with FeatureCAM and the customer uses it, albeit transparently, to directly read AutoDesk Inventor files. SolidEdge provides a similar toolkit at no charge. SolidWorks, at no charge, makes it possible for FeatureCAM to read the solids directly from their native files. In all three of these cases the customer simply says "import abc.xyz" and the appropriate toolkit is transparently used to directly import the file into FeatureCAM.

In the mid-range CAD market the trend is toward free data-extraction toolkits. We have several customers making use of such technology. We have far fewer users making use of standard file formats. The reason is simple: customers don't want an intermediate file format to get in the way. Instead, they want their applications, such as FeatureCAM, to directly read native CAD data. Not only do intermediate file formats create an extra step in communications with other applications, but they also tend to leave things out or pervert the data in some way.