SolidWorks World officially kicked off for me today with a wonderful mix of presentations by some of the greatest minds at SolidWorks Corporation. Today I attended the Press Breakout Sessions.

The first session I attended was given by Jeff Ray – the CEO of SolidWorks, he covered kind of the What’s Happening at SolidWorks Corporation session. He started off his presentation by announcing that this year SolidWorks World has 4,400 attendees which is up from 3,600 a year ago in New Orleans. After this he went into and touched on a variety of issues one of them being what is going to change at SolidWorks Corporation now that he is the CEO and what will stay the same. He answered this both ways – he said that first off nothing will change because the focus remains the same, there are still over 2 million users that are still using 2D CAD software that need to be introduced to 3D modeling. He then followed that up by saying that everything is going to change, there are still fixes that need to be made to the software to make it, dare I say, perfect. A bit of information that I found interesting is that it is a requirement of the SolidWorks executives to make customer visits on a yearly basis and sit in a corner and observe how the users are using the software, observe what kind of issues they are having and what features they are using. He also said that the main focus of the 2009 release will be on performance, which is a smart move after the UI changes and some of the issues that have arisen from the 2008 release. At the end of his presentation he had a Q & A session which covered a wide variety of topics, including one that stumped him from Josh Mings (what a trouble maker).

The second session attended today was a presentation on the Educational Efforts at SolidWorks which was given by Marie Planchard with some help from Scott Fraser (professor at Long Beach Community College) and a student of his. SolidWorks is getting involved in all of the areas of education ranging all the way from middle schools to universities, it is in 173 of the top 200 tech schools and in over 100 countries. A new initiative of SolidWorks is the CSWA test, which proves to potential employers that these college graduates are well schooled and can run SolidWorks effectively. It sounds to me like SolidWorks is on the right track of educating students early to get them interested in the software. A cool new partnership SolidWorks has formed is with IFI, Inc. and Revell, these three are teaming up to provide the VEXplorer robot package which includes a copy of the SolidWorks Student Edition software, very cool.

The third breakout session I attended today was given by Jon Hirschtick (who made a guest appearance at the Blog Squad event last night) that covered the History of CAD: the last 50 years. This was a very insightful presentation on where the CAD industry has been over the last 50 years and some things that Jon would like to see in the future. In the 1990′s the dream began for SolidWorks (Hirschtick is a co-founder of the software) with 3 visions for the company. First they wanted the ability to put the power of 3D CAD software on every engineers desktop computer, they didn’t want the customer to have to have 2 machines to deal with (accomplished). The second vision they had was they wanted SolidWorks to become a strong company (accomplished). And the third vision they initially had was that they wanted to treat their customers right (accomplished). By accomplishing these 3 visions they have had 16 major releases and over 700,000 users worldwide. Going forward Jon stated that they want to remain focused on the fundamentals which includes but is not limited to reliability, speed, ease of use, data exchange, drafting and Geometric Modeling. This was a very interesting session and it seems like they are heading in the right direction.

The final session I attended today was given by the R&D panel at SolidWorks which was hosted by Cholly Nachman. The panel consisted of Austin O’Malley (Chief Tech Officer), Paul Chastell (Director of SolidWorks Development), Brian Harrison (Heads of SolidWorks Labs), Scott Harris (VP of New Product Development) and finally Jim Wilkinson (Director of User Experience). This was a very informative session with a lot of insight on the behind the scenes stuff that happens and is happening at SolidWorks.

Well off I go to the the Partner Pavillion to attend the official Welcome Reception.

Stay tuned for more coverage of SolidWorks World 2008, including interviews with Greg Jankowski, Jon Hirschtick and Jeff Ray.