These days manufacturing and design teams continuously collaborate with colleagues across traditional office boundaries and manufacturing floors in an effort to meet with growing demand and competition at a global scale. An essential tool for this industry is computer-aided design and engineering (CAD/CAE) software, which, unfortunately, was never designed to address complex collaboration requirements. Now more than ever, there is a growing need for service-oriented collaborative CAD/CAE solutions, essentially moving away from the high performance single user and machine solutions of the past and towards more portable service-based multi-user systems. The aim of this paper is twofold; first, we examine the domains literature with the goal of documenting a complete set of software requirements, which will map the design of collaborative CAD/CAE solutions, and, second, we present our novel architecture and implementation details of a collaborative CAD/CAE system deployed as a cloud service. Our main focus is on the remote visualisation component of the solution and the practical architectural deployment capable of overcoming software performance, interoperability, modularity, compatibility, scalability and interface interactivity challenges. We validate our architecture in the field by deploying an industry-defined proof-of-concept visualisation system used for the determination and optimisation of the design parameters of professional footwear.