openBoM at Autodesk Forge DevCon 2016 in San Francisco, CA

We had a privilege to be invited to the Autodesk Forge DevCon 2016 Developers Conference in San Francisco, CA. The conference, Autodesk’s first dedicated to Forge Platform developers, took place at Fort Mason and was attended by over 1200 engineers, partners, and media representatives.

The main conference topic was the Autodesk Forge Platform and the various APIs Autodesk makes available.

So how does the conference connect to what we do at openBoM? The vision of Forge is a federated data platform to share and manage design data. In a nutshell, Forge is a set of micro-services and components (eg. Viewer). Products such as Autodesk Fusion360 run on top of Forge platform infrastructure. You can read a few of my posts with more information about Forge, here, and here.

openBoM was an early adopter of the Forge Data Management API, which allows openBoM to get design information from any CAD data source supported by Autodesk Forge. We were delighted to see our work presented by Autodesk’s Senior Software Architect Ben Cochran during keynotes on the first day of the conference.

The following video fragment of Ben’s keynote presentation

I taught a separate class where I shared information on how openBoM integrated with the Autodesk A360 Viewer, Forge Data Management to enable the creation of BOMs and manage downstream manufacturing scenarios.

Here’s the presentation I gave:

In conclusion:

The value that Autodesk Forge provides is access to design information in the cloud produced by desktop and cloud CAD systems. By integrating with Forge, openBoM leverages design data and increases the value of tools such as Autodesk Fusion360 for makers and hardware startups by giving them the ability to manage BOM records, collaborate with contractors, suppliers and contract manufacturers.

Best,

Oleg