Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1190860
34 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2019 Shaughnessy: Originally, you were a designer, so you've been through ECAD. Mazzitelli: Right, but the collaboration pro- cess has been tough to manage because it has always involved manual intervention. Un- til now, there has never been a quick and ac- curate way to manage the data going back and forth. Shaughnessy: There's never been a good for- mat. Each side wants different pieces of data, so it's not a conversation; they're talking past each other. Mazzitelli: Right, and file-based methodologies still do not fully support ECAD requirements in MCAD, such as cavities, etc. Also, if two people are making changes at the same time to the same thing, who wins? When it's managed in the cloud, you have better coordination and collaboration versus having to rely on people to read-in the right files in the right order. Dan Feinberg: Especially if you're making changes to the same thing, and they don't know what each other is doing. Mazzitelli: Altium has an initiative here to make that work, and I think it's going to give them a competitive advantage. They are working with SolidWorks, Creo, and Inventor right now. Shaughnessy: You have also been into data management for quite some time. What are the big issues you see in data management? Mazzitelli: When you work for a PLM vendor, data management is part of the vocabulary. But coming into an ECAD vendor and compa- ny, the messaging is going to be interesting to position. As a whole, designers have been do- ing things the way they've been doing them for 40 years, and it works. So, it's not necessarily the board designers who are going to push to have this technology; it's more at the IT-level and the executive-level/management because they're the ones that want a single source of truth for all of their data. Shaughnessy: You have all this data, which is great, but managing it is a whole thing in itself. Mazzitelli: Every designer typically has their own naming conventions for boards. For ex- ample, I might call mine "Linda_Placement1, 2, 3, and 4." When I finish my placement and am going to route, I now label them, "Linda_ Route1, 2, etc." Everybody does studies. So, even though I may be at "Linda_Placement5," I may think, "Well, 2 was better, so I'm ulti- mately going to go back to that." But what if I go on vacation? If you're gone and somebody has to pick up your design, what are they go- ing to think? They're going to go to the latest one, which may not be the best one, but you forgot to communicate that before you left. With Nexus and other data management products in the industry, this now takes the version control, or the work in process, out of the hands of the users; they don't have to wor- ry about it. Every time they save, it creates a new version of the design. Then, when you're ready to release to prototype or production, you have all of your data under revision con- trol so that the entire enterprise design team knows that it's the final version. Ultimately, this will make things easier, but it's still an ed- ucation process in the industry. Shaughnessy: We've gone from not having enough data to having almost too much data to manage, and it's all about making the data accessible. Mazzitelli: Yes. And many designers don't see the value in data management because every- body looks at things from their own perspec- tive. But data management exposes the data to the enterprise, including component man- agers, product managers, test engineers, and marketing people. It enables the entire infra- structure of a company to have access to the data almost on demand. Right now, if some- body needs a status on a particular PCB, they still need to walk over to the designer and ask where they are on the board. This could be vir- tually eliminated if the designs were managed and exposed within that enterprise system.