Brad Holtz to Introduce COFES Spirit into the Moscow CAD/PLM Event in September

Many actors of the Russian CAD/PLM market have heard that the Fourth multi-vendor isicad Forum will be held on 21 September in Moscow. Some of these actors decided to join the Forum, among them – representatives of ASCON, Autodesk, Dassault Systemes, HP, NVIDIA, PTC, Siemens PLM Software, SpaiceClaim, Top Systems, and others. LEDAS also participates not only as the organizer.

A special feature of isicad-2010 is its combination with the seminar COFES-Russia. Even as only a formality, such a combination would be honorable and pleasant because COFES is recognized in the world as a leading and very fruitful conference in the field of CAD/PLM. But I hope this combination will be productive in terms of its direct and strategic results: we are going to bring to our forum a rich experience of twelve successful COFES events aimed at the analyzing and encouraging creative ideas for the benefit of our industry as a whole.

One of the principal inventors and implementers of the COFES format is Brad Holtz - President of COFES and Cyon Research. I have already presented Brad to the Russian readers on several occasions - in particular as an analyst whose predictions of the market developments are very often justified. A few weeks ago I have at last met Brad and got a chance to discuss in details the preparations for the September event and to listen to the first-hand Brad’s explanations of some basic principles that ensured success of COFES.

For the first time I face to face encountered such a wonderful professional approach to the organization of conferences - an approach that is based on a very clear ideology, style, and commitment to the accurate technology and procedures of organization. I do not believe that in our one-day September event we will be able to fully apply the experience of COFES which always is held during 3-4 days out of town. Our isicad-2010/COFES-Russia will be held in the center of a megalopolis tired from traffic jams and unusual heat with participants who are not too much inclined to interact with their competitors (except for friendly beer get-togethers) and who instead of industry-wide discussions prefer advertising their own offerings… Yet this first experience will certainly be useful for all of us.

Brad Holtz will perform in Moscow with a large guest presentation on his vision of global CAD market, serving as a moderator of the plenary session and will participate actively in the work of several thematic round tables, as well as – in the press conference. In addition Brad is invited to the Forum Autodesk (to be held in Moscow on 22-23 September), also he is expected to have a series of individual meetings with Russian companies. Only several days after Moscow, on Sept. 28, Brad will keynote at a conference in Detroit... By the way, in mid December there will also be the COFES-Israel Summit.

At my request, Brad kindly wrote a letter to the readers of isicad.ru/isicad.net and to the participants of the Moscow Forum/Seminar. From the letter, I found out that Brad had already visited Moscow at the beginning of perestroika, and he then formed opinion about the benefits of Russia's IT - benefits that should today become apparent...

References:

Brad Holtz’s letter to the readers of isicad portal: English original and Russian translation.

COFES-Russia / isicad-2010: English and Russian pages

COFES

Cyon Research

COFES-Israel

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LEDAS Joins Siberian High-Tech Business Technopark

The Russian Government launched "Development of the High-Tech Oriented Technoparks" program which is informally considered as a project aimed at driving modernization and innovation in Russia. Novosibirsk Technopark founded in Academgorodok (a world-famous research center) is one of the largest development projects in the Eastern part of the Russian Federation powered by partnership between the government and private sector.

The resident status of Novosibirsk Technopark will allow LEDAS Ltd. to maximize the advantages of:
- top-priority use of Technopark services, including rental of premises;
- participation in support programs for Technopark residents;
- participation in innovative activity support programs, implemented in accordance with the legislation of the Russian Federation, the Novosibirsk Region and Novosibirsk;
- participation in Technopark development programs.

The new LEDAS status does not presume any changes in its ownership and will not violate its obligations to any third party.

There are several types of discussions regarding technoparks and around, such as:
- What is the correlation between technoparks and Skolkovo Innovation Zone (announced as the key Russian innovation project)?
- Can projects initiated by government (more generally – top down projects) but not by society (including single creative individuals) succeed?

Here are my short comments:
- Smaller organizations far from Moscow but supported by developed infrastructure (like in Novosibirsk, the city with about 2 million people) can be more effective than a multi-billion project with a political flavor very close to Moscow,
- Academgorodok itself is an example of a successful “top-down” project, although it was oriented to fundamental science and was founded in very different times of late 50th of ХХ century,
- Nevertheless, a technopark based on the Academgorodok infrastructure and fertilized by its numerous educated human resources with already achieved substantial business results has a lot of practical advantages compared with artificially generated Big Projects…

This was my very simplified opinion.

References (English): Novosibirsk Technopark website, Cloud Computing is the First Approved Project for the Russian Silicon Valley (my recent blog post).
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ODA members can now integrate LEDAS geometric constraint solver with a Teigha for .dwg files

ODA (Open Design Alliance) announced that its 2000+ members can now integrate the Ledas LGS 2D geometric constraint solver with a Teigha for .dwg files client application to provide easy access to constraint solving functionality.

The functionality is illustrated by a demo which can be downloaded at ODA web site, it enables:
- Loading a drawing file containing constraints, and render the drawing.
- Adding constraints to a drawing file.
- Moving geometry on the screen, when the mouse is released all geometry is updated per the constraints contained in the drawing.
- Editing distance or angle parameters, causing constrained geometry to be updated automatically.

See the news at ODA web site page and LEDAS web site.

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