A designer in Philadelphia, a CEO in Miami, an engineering lead in Austin: at Sunfish, the US-based builder of underwater vehicles for inspection and water management, no one on the core team sits in the same place. Yet every part of every vehicle has to move through the same SolidWorks environment, checked and approved by people who often don’t use CAD software themselves. How to organize that without standing up a dedicated server is the question CEO Alberto Lopez faced — and eventually solved with Sibe, a cloud-based platform for CAD document management and collaboration.
Sunfish, headquartered in Austin, Texas, builds underwater robots for inspection work and water management, working with US state water authorities and infrastructure clients. Every vehicle program runs in SolidWorks, with simple, sequential part numbers — which means the team relies heavily on detailed file descriptions just to find the right file. Trickier than the file names, though, is the organization around them: no one sits in the same place, and not everyone works in the same software.
“We’re remote. The designer is in Philadelphia, our CEO is in Miami, and I’m in Austin,” says Lopez. “We needed a way to design, review, and release without everyone sitting in the same place — or even in the same software.”
A vault of their own, without a new server
Sunfish had long shared its CAD file environment with another company under a shared-IP agreement. As the business grew into an independent operation, the need for its own system — with full control over files, versions, and releases — became increasingly pressing.
The obvious alternative, standing up another SolidWorks PDM server, was something Lopez had already done once, over a Christmas break. He wasn’t eager to repeat it: buying, configuring, and administering a server, plus a VPN that remote designers would have to log into and pull a license from every time they wanted access to the vault.
A third obstacle compounded the other two. With a distributed team, not everyone who needs to weigh in — the CEO, the CTO, outside partners — holds a SolidWorks license. Reviews ended up running on screenshots and slide decks, a detour that slowed down every design iteration.
Reviewing in the browser, designing in SolidWorks
Sibe offers a cloud-based platform for CAD document management and collaboration, built around a native add-in that works directly inside SolidWorks. Engineers check files in and out the way they always have, while the platform quietly tracks every version, handles assembly references, and keeps a local cache for offline work. There’s no new server, no VPN, and no license server to administer; according to Sunfish, the system was up and running in thirty minutes.
For reviewers, the change is bigger. They simply open a shared link and view the design in any browser, no SolidWorks license required, and leave comments directly on the model. The designer in Philadelphia sends a link, the CTO reviews from Miami, and the team works together in one place instead of passing screenshots and slides back and forth.
That sharing happens without exposing the underlying geometry: for the browser viewer, Sibe generates a separate, neutral model rather than the native SolidWorks file, so designs can be reviewed online without the risk of reverse engineering.
“Ken gave me the demo and I got it pretty quick,” Lopez says, referring to Ken Maren, Chief Solutions Architect at Sibe. “I figured I could do all of this myself over a weekend instead of buying a new server.”
What actually changes in practice
The difference from the old way of working shows up everywhere. Where Sunfish once had to buy and administer its own server and VPN, the platform is now ready in half an hour, with no infrastructure to maintain. Remote access used to mean VPN plus a SolidWorks license per person; now a browser link is enough, and no license is needed just to look. Design reviews used to run on screenshots and slide decks, while reviewers now comment directly on the live model, in any browser. And where the CAD environment used to be shared with another company, Sunfish now has its own vault, with every version tracked.
