Team of CAPP VERTICAL Left ASCON to Implement HORIZONTAL

Not surprisingly ASCON as the leading Russian CAD vendor very often becomes a newsmaker of the CIS market. The previous news was about the company’s 2010 results and future plans. In March, the Russian market received from ASCON a small (?) sensation: a team of the company’s CAPP solution known as VERTICAL left ASCON and founded a new company called SDI Solution.

VERTICAL is a substantial element of the ASCON’ s PLM offering, however it brought not more than 5% of the company’s 2010 income. All the rights for VERTICAL as well as its maintenance and distribution facilities stay at ASCON.

The founders of SDI Solution headed by Andrey Andrichenko, Ph.D., are going to intensively build a new CAPP system. They declared that its principles are reflected by the new company name: SDI means semantic data integration. Andrey says that all CADs are basically expert systems therefore a new trend is to change object approach by a semantic paradigm: this mainstream opens new capabilities for knowledge representation and for improvement of decision making in the CAD domain.

SDI Solution mentioned that their new system will perhaps be called HORIZONTAL.

Yesterday isicad.ru published a big interview with the founders of the new company «SDI Solution: A new Generation of CAPP» and a comment of Vladimir Zakharov, ASCON Director for Software Development, called (if I am not mistaken with an English version of the proverb) "Every cloud has a silver lining".

As I can conclude from all available information, the divorce was implemented peacefully. Probably the reason for this divorce is almost natural contradiction between comparatively-short-term industrial approach of ASCON and the will of the VERTICAL developers to promptly implement their radically new ideas.

I do not predict any problems that ASCON can meet in the near future with maintenance and local developments of VERTICAL. But of course the company should think and decide about the next generation(s) of the system.

As for SDI Solution, I am certain that they have good constructive ideas and very probably can rapidly implement a prototype. The problem will then be in industrialization, integration into (which?) PLM environment, distribution, and other... Therefore, not surprisingly, SDI Solution announced that they have already negotiated (or will have such contacts) on a partnership with Autodesk, DS, PTC, and Siemens PLM. And also with ASCON.

Btw, yesterday I re-animated my belingual twitter.