Last week, Authentise announced an interesting new integration, but it turns out there is much more to the story.
The initial story told of how Authentise has directly integrated their “Flows” AM workflow solution with Autodesk Fusion via the latter company’s API system. The APIs allow external parties to make calls to Fusion to perform a variety of functions.
This is quite powerful, and Authentise seems to have realized how these capabilities can superpower their existing Flows system.
Workflows can be quite complex when designing parts, involving multiple parties, and most importantly, involving multiple tools. Each party and tool makes the situation more complex. Flows attempts to simplify the matter by providing an end-to-end workflow for all parties.
However, there’s still that issue of using multiple tools. For example, at a step in the workflow, you might have to bounce out to perform some tasks in a CAD program.
A CAD program like, say, Autodesk Fusion.
I think you get the idea here: with the API integration, Authentise can offer some Autodesk Fusion functions directly from within Flows, meaning users don’t have to leave the tool for these tasks. They can just execute them from within Flows.
Here you can see a chart of how this works:
On the top line, we have the Flows workflow through order, schedule, and build phases. On the bottom, we can see the different functions in Fusion that can (or will) be invoked directly from Flows.
This is obviously quite advantageous for Flows users, but there’s another twist to the story.
By opening up these APIs, Autodesk has provided a way for others to compete against CAD systems or even Autodesk themselves. For example, it might be possible to develop a new and unique way to automatically generate a nesting configuration for a group of 3D models. To implement it, you need only connect via the API, and you might not need to purchase other expensive CAD tools that perform the same function.
We could see some interesting competition evolve as a result of these APIs, and Authentise seems to be taking full advantage.
Via Authentise
