Re: Re: PDS and PDMS

Some clarification of the current 3D piping design software business, please correct any mistakes that I might have made (it's difficult to keep track these days) and some of this is just my opinion:

Bentley's MicroStation is the CAD software that PDS and PDMS are based on. COADE's CADWorx, Bentley's AutoPlant (which was purchased from Rebis), AEC Design's CADPIPE and a few other smaller players are all based on AutoCAD.

Both PDS and PDMS have "changed names" to Intergraph's SmartPlant 3D and

   Aveva's Vantage Plant Design respectively. As far as I can tell, both SmartPlant 3D and Vantage Plant Design no longer use MicroStation as their CAD engine and have gone with a proprietary solution.

Intergraph seems to have a pile of cash (or used to) from a settlement with Intel regarding chip design legal issues.

Also, in my understanding, the successors to PDS and PDMS (SmartPlant 3D and Vantage Plant Design) will be/are not compatible with older file formats.

MicroStation offering an AutoCAD-based 3D piping program (ex-Rebis stuff) as well as their own seems a bit "off", since they are a direct competitor to Autodesk and some say that support from Autodesk for the ACAD-based, ex-Rebis code will just go away.

CADWorx is counting on this to happen, as they are probably the largest AutoCAD-based 3D piping software and have historical links back to the highly-respected CAESAR stress analysis package as well as official Autodesk support. They also claim that all their support people are professional engineers that are experienced with process piping and plant design.

I don't know where CADPIPE fits into this hypothetical scenario.

One thing that I find annoying about some of these programs is that many of them do not indicate pricing on their websites.

At least these days we are no longer locked-in to specific hardware.

Finally, I'm including a partial quote from the latest upfront.ezine:

"At the same time, creating artificial boundaries due to proprietary representations is probably more of an impediment to an industry. Imagine a part catalog that couldn't establish standard characteristics of common components just because the different vendors didn't want their products to be readily compared against similar products. From a consumers' (in this case, the designer's) perspective, that just doesn't make any sense."

Paul

vornel wrote:

> Dear OMID,
>
> I agree, as an ex-user of both packages I would say that PDMS has
> the edge in user friendliness and openness but both perform
> exceptionally well if administered and set up properly AND both
> payback well when projects are large. But I do have a small
> correction to what you wrote...
>
> ...CADWorx is from COADE www.coade.com, CADPIPE is from AEC Design
> Group www.cadpipe.com and AutoPLANT is now from Bentley
> www.bentley.com
>
> Eko - this is the nature of the beast - these system were never
> designed to be simple or easy - they were (are) designed to be
> comprehensive.
Received on Wed Jan 12 21:01:00 2005