CAD/PLM in June: How I Saw It From Russia Or Within the Country. Part II: PTC, ASCON, and Autodesk

See Part I: Top Systems and Siemens PLM

3. We at isicad/LEDAS are very sorry that due to technical reasons we could not take advantage of the generous and kind invitation from PTC to attend a recent PlanetPTC at Las Vegas. I tried to extract some information especially interesting for me from twitter, from Oleg Shilovitsky, and again from Roopinder Tara. Here for the purposes of my amateur psychoanalysis I took a repeatedly quoted phrase by Jim Heppelmann “We don’t call it CAD anymore. I think we can assume that all design is now computer aided.  It’s not 1970.” Well, maybe traditionally subordinate role of PDM in relation to MCAD was for a long time haunting Heppelmann (the founder of quite/very successful WindChill) and then, finally, he has got a chance to win back by killing Pro/E, especially as such killings did just come into fashion:). Oedipus complex? I feel sympathy for the PTC at least because of its Soviet/Russian origin and by the fact that today for many of its software development managers the Russian language is native. However I do not believe that this PTC can by the overall income approach DS and Autodesk.  

Maybe because today people are very much excited by Creo, we could last week see such a twitter discussion:

• Roopinder Tara:  RT Creating sphere with Creo Parametric 1.0 http://bit.ly/j8yowR . Do we really need a tutorial for this? Where's the ease of use ?
• Blake Courter @rtara Creating a sphere in SpaceClaim: http://twitvid.com/6AJCI
• Dmitry Ushakov @bcourter @rtara Parametric design with spheres in Rhino 3D based on LEDAS LDD http://t.co/joE2yU8
• Jon Banquer  @dmitryushakov @bcourter @rtara If you create a parametric package for SpaceClaim I'll buy it. That's a promise.
• Dmitry Ushakov  @JonBanquer @bcourter @rtara Agreed! :)

The day after tomorrow (6) at the Rhino user conference in London, Dmitry Ushakov will demonstrate how the LEDAS Driving Dimensions module transforms Rhino into MCAD and how it can enhance any CAD with direct modeling facilities.    

4. ASCON, the leading Russian CAD company, is known not only by its strong KOMPAS 3D MCAD as well as PLM components but also by practical achievements in SaaS, and more generally – by their serious attention to modern trends in CAD/PLM industry. ASCON is increasing its marketing activity by investing obviously considerable resources. Of course, they organize a lot of events, in particular often coming to the end users in the cities and towns all around Russia and CIS. But last week the company held a comparatively unusual conference “Technologies of ASCON” where my attention was attracted by a statement made by the ASCON director of business development Evgeniy Bakhin: “We want our original geometric modeler to become a product to be worldwide distributed independently of KOMPAS 3D”.

Several days later, at the big event in Saint-Petersburg on PLM in shipbuilding,  Alexey Petrov, the ASCON deputy director for working with key customers, made a presentation with a message that big Russian customers, such as from defense, because of economical and security reasons, should prefer national Russian PLM solutions. This message, couple years ago more intensive, is for sure a part of marketing which maybe is reasonable (I mean - effective) when addressed to the defense customers. Alexey demonstrated a chart from IDC (however from 2007 ) which shoes that more than 70% of CAD related software in Russia is imported:

5. Autodesk CIS is implementing its Big Marketing Project called SAPRYAZHENIE (see here   about the Russian language trick with this name as well as characteristics of the project itself).  The team of Autodesk managers and experts, together with active members of the Autodesk CIS community (today – 3000+ registered members), including related bloggers, are subsequently visiting 13 cities in Russia and CIS where they with real triumph meet local Autodesk today’s and potential users: tell them about fresh products and solutions, give prompt technological consulting, explain business schemes, etc. In June, the event was held in 5 cities in European, Siberian, and Far East regions, in some cases situated 10 000 km from each other… From all what is known, heard, and seen, one can conclude that Autodesk is very smartly addressing young generation of engineering software users: kindle their interest and enthusiasm by the methods and in the language mostly natural and effective for youngsters. Note also that by the beginning of their road show, Autodesk CIS released the first issues of “The Autodesk CIS Community Magazine”  which also integrates their user community…