ITAR or EAR Compliance

daniel_herrington

I run a small advanced manufacturing business which has used Onshape from the start and we are starting to do more work with aerospace and DoD customers where the ITAR issue will be a deal breaker.  I have talked with Onshape a few times about this issue (many of you may have too) and it is a solvable problem but Onshape needs a stronger case that if they make the investment to support ITAR, there will either be A) existing users that would pay more for ITAR support or  new potential users that can't use Onshape right now because of the ITAR issue.  If anyone in the community is willing, could you answer the following 3 questions or otherwise voice your support for this issue?

1. If Onshape had ITAR support, how many new users are you aware of that would consider switching CAD systems to Onshape?  (e.g. my engineering team of X, the company I work for with Y CAD users, however you want to quantify it).
2. If you are an existing Onshape user, how many existing users are you aware of that would pay more for ITAR support in Onshape?
3. If you are an existing Onshape user and would pay more for ITAR support, could you estimate how much more you would pay?

I'll start things off by answering for our business:

1. I am not specifically aware of any companies looking at Onshape and not choosing it because of ITAR reasons.  However I have talked with 2-3 small companies with 2-3 potential users each who deal with ITAR data that I could connect to Onshape.
2. We are currently a company of 5 CAD users, expect to be 8-10 CAD users in ~1 year, and continue growing thereafter - all of which would use Onshape with ITAR support
3. Latest professional license costs $2100/user/year and I would probably pay another $500-1000/user/year.  With 10 seats that would be $26-31K/year for Onshape w/ ITAR compared to Solidworks Professional 2018 which is $5.5k/seat up front + $1500/seat/year maintenance + $10K server cost? (that is a complete guess) spread over 5 years lifetime = $28,000/year.  I know this is not an apples to apples comparison - just a back-of-the-envelop calculation.

Thanks in advance for any feedback you can provide.

-Daniel

Stefan_DMS

Looks like ITAR might already be on the books: https://www.digitalengineering247.com/article/itar-compliance-in-the-age-of-on-demand-hpc/

Jbohrer88

We definitely need this. With there being no offline mode, and VisualCAM being used in the cloud as well, we have no way to perform our normal document control OR machine programming ourselves. This is becoming a major problem for us, and dare I say it I may have to get a copy of an unspeakable application just because of this. We could handle who has access to the "ITAR" or "EAR" folder, I would just like the option to make certain folders export control compliant (of course there would be a cost associated with this, I can't say what it would be or how the pricing model would work, I'll leave that to OnShape).

Like Stefan posted above, AWS now has EAR compliant servers so maybe this is coming. I had this problem a few years ago at another company and it was a brick wall when it came to utilizing OnShape for their use because a quarter of the work was export controlled.

lucas_johnson222

Not having ITAR compliance is definitely a deal breaker for our company. If Onshape had it, I could make the case for transitioning at least 5 cad users to onshape. 

tim_hess

Just checking in on this topic - I'm at a new company and we're tentatively shopping around for CAD software for some upcoming projects for 3 or 4 seats currently. Would likely be willing to pay in the $2500-$3000 range for these seats. 

Any chance there's been movement on this? 

NeilCooke

@tim_hess unfortunately not.