The platform provides many helpful features, such as editing and slicing, both basic and advanced, and sharing, so any 3D printer can connect to the cloud. It even offers native CAD to web 3D print integrations for design tools from Autodesk, Dassault Systèmes, Onshape, and Siemens.
Due to its rapid expansion, 3DPrinterOS, which was one of six Microsoft startups chosen to display at Microsoft Build this year, made the decision to significantly upgrade its capabilities two years ago, and announced that it was moving its real-time manufacturing SaaS platform to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
Now, Microsoft Azure and 3DPrinterOS are building on this existing partnership – the two have announced a new 3D printing software bundle, which is the first enterprise I/T compliant 3D printer management platform in the world.
“Our goal was to make it incredibly easy for Enterprises already using Azure to share 3d printers and files across an entire company without fear of violating I/T and compliance rules,” explained John Dogru, CEO of 3DPrinterOS. “Enterprises can now deploy a platform agnostic 3D printing world wide.
“What we learned talking to our customers, is that they want a neutral I/T compliant 3D printer management platform, and a proven team that can integrate every printer manufacturer, now and into the future.”
For the last two decades, the 3D printing industry has been “plagued with incompatibility,” according to Dogru, as even more hardware manufacturers are developing software which only benefits their specific machines, just like in the era of mainframe computers and word processors. Microsoft kick-started the computing revolution by giving thousands of developers the chance to build applications on a single, common platform. Now that 3DPrinterOS is directly integrated, I/T can manage users worldwide using the Microsoft Active Directory.
Dogru shared with 3DPrint.com, “When we look at mega trends in the world, software is moving to the cloud, operating system are moving to the cloud, and the power of real-time direct 3D printing has been proven in many of the case studies in top universities using 3DPrinterOS. Now, Enterprises want the same technology, instantly deployed to 1000’s of engineers, without the restriction.”
According to RightScale, the average company uses roughly five to seven public and private clouds. With the new Azure-3DPrinterOS bundle, the 14% of institutions and 90% of Fortune 500 companies that already use Azure will immediately be able to start using the innovative 3DPrinterOS 3D printing platform.
“We chose to work with 3DPrinterOS because their 3d printing software covers the widest amount of machines,” said Jim Brisimitzis, the General Manager of Microsoft Startups and Director of xMicrosoft Ventures. “Coupled with our Azure private and public clouds, this simplifies how enterprises of all sizes can manage printers and users.”
The new bundle between Microsoft Azure and 3DPrinterOS has come about soon after Azure experienced phenomenal growth in 2017; the Azure Government cloud platform even earned Authority to Operate certifications from both the US Air Force and the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
With an overarching goal of majorly decreasing the effort needed to deploy 3D printing safely within enterprises, the bundle gives Azure cloud users the ability to share 3D printers and files with any collaborators through a corporate intranet connection – making it easy for IT departments to use and maintain the systems.
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[Images provided by 3DPrinterOS]