Thanks to DS and Siemens, Russian PLM market in August was completely devoted to aviation

DS and SPLM are always competing in the Russian aircraft industry however in this August the companies marketing activity seems to become record-breaking. One of the reasons is a traditional biennial Aviation&Space salon MAKS  held  about 10 days ago near Moscow. Within two weeks isicad.ru received from DS and SPLM five (5) press-releases: two of them described effective participation of DS in MAKS, one from SPLM announced that Ukrainian aircraft company “Antonov” for its transport planes selected NX and Teamcenter (btw Antonov also uses DS solutions), while two more press-releases announced that both companies are very closely cooperate with Moscow Aviation Institute (MAI).

DS has installed in MAI five hundred (500!) licenses of SolidWorks Campus, organizes education process based on SW and CATIA for junior and senior courses correspondingly, and apply SW for industrial design of light aircrafts in educational center of MAI.

The SPLM press-release announces deployment of all company’s PLM solutions for all elements of the educational process of MAI.    

Also note that both DS and SPLM actively contributed to the design of the Russian Superjet-100. 

Some Russian links:

Dassault Systèmes announce cooperation with Moscow Aviation Institute

Siemens PLM Software and Moscow Aviation Institute announce extension of their cooperation

Innovation technologies of Dassault Systèmes at MAKS-2011

ANTONOV selects Siemens PLM Software solutions to implement projects for transport aviation

Dassault Systèmes held its press-conference at  MAKS-2011

Why COFES? Today ASCON knows the answer

Look at the passage from a recent press-release  of Lightworks:

 SHEFFIELD, UK (9 August 2011) - Lightworks, the world's leading supplier of rendering solutions for developers of advanced 3D computer graphics software, has today announced their partnership with ASCON, a developer and integrator of professional CAD/AEC/PLM solutions.

   ASCON, one of the first CAD developers within the Russian market, produces the KOMPAS -3D modelling software sold to over 40,000 customers all over the world. ASCON has licensed the Lightworks Artisan product and will be offering their customers a plug-in to this from KOMPAS-3D. ASCON will become the first company in Russia to sell an Artisan-based product when they release in September...

The case itself is ordinary for the global market but note that Russian software companies were so far typically inclined to do everything in-house. This can be explained by several reasons: survival of Soviet mental and actual isolation, references to Russian industry specifics, lack of international communication and foreign language skills, side-effect of really good high tech education and competence that in contradition with business and common sense prompt to believe that "we can do everything ourselves and better than any others"... During couple recent years ASCON seems to clearly overcome this defect and is intensively trying to be included into the global market with its specialization of labor. I think this is a clear sign of ASCON's maturity.    

Now look at the post by a very popular Russian blogger cadovod - Oleg Zykov - who is  the manager for innovation projects at ASCON (nice and meaningful position, isn't it?): 

When in my blog I promptly reported the visit of our ASCON delegation to COFES 2011, some readers justly reproached me: where are business issues? it looks like COFES is something which enabled you to visit Hollywood! Then Vladimir Malukh (LEDAS-isicad) rightly pointed out that COFES is not for spectators, it is for participants. Today I am at last able to tell you about one of the results of the ASCON attendance of COFES 2010: it is about our contract with Lightworks...

I can assure you that the agreement with Lightworks is not the only one ASCON brought from Arizona.

As for LEDAS and isicad, we are definitely aware about unique importance of COFES events: Vladimir Malukh (LEDAS Director on engineering consulting) in 2009 and Dmitry Ushakov (LEDAS CEO) in 2011 were among the participants,  see a COFES report of Dmitry who came back from Arizona also not empty-handed. Moreover, we have organized in Novosibirsk three COFES-like events - isicad 3-days multi-vendor forums (2004, 2006, 2008). 

And in September 2010 I was very happy to have a lucky opportunity of combining great COFES experience of Brad Holtz with isicad popularity in Russia: we have prepared and held in Moscow a COFES-Russia seminar combined with a one-day isicad event (NB: Oleg Zykov made there a presentation about ASCON's practical results on cloud-based KOMPAS 3D). 

There in Moscow, Brad has remarkably presented both the COFES idea as well as his unique personal competence and charisma. (At the picture - opening of the Moscow event: in a moment Brad will put a Russian fur hat on a cactus, a symbol of Arizona).

The presence of Russians at COFES has thereafter multiply increased and in future will likely increase more. Besides Arizona, people seem to be eager to attend next regional COFES which may be held in Russia or somewhere around... 

Russians in Arizona, April 2011:

Oleg Zykov, Dmitry Ushakov, Galina Chernyak (CSD, Executive Director), Maksim Bogdanov (ASCON, CEO), Vladimir Panchenko (ASCON, Chief Analyst).

@levin_david        (English)

@TheDavidLevin  (Russian)

Autodesk and ASCON to hold their largest CIS forums in the same day in September

ASCON, the largest Russian CAD provider annonced today that its MCAD forum, assocoated with The Day-of-Machine-Constructor, will be held in twenty five CIS cities on 21 of September. Earlier, September 21 and 22 were announced by Autodesk-CIS as the days of its traditional Forum "Technologies of Design" which tend to be more and more look like AU. ASCON sources claim that this is a coincidence.  

Autodesk and ASCON compete in CIS, each of them having around a quarter of the CIS CAD market.

Direct Modeling Discussion at isicad.ru Exceeds 100 Comments

Maybe some of you have read "New Armor for Rhino" by Dmitry Ushakov who artistically and in all related details reported about new capabilities of Rhino 3D demonstrated recently in London at Rhino UK User Meeting 2011. Above all, Dmitry described RhinoWorks, the LEDAS plug-in which complements direct modeling (DM) capabilities of Rhino by rejecting tree derivation in favor of a constraint set. As a result, RhinoWorks plug-in can recognize design intent by identifying many constraints automatically (coincidence, parallel alignment, equality of radii, etc.). The mechanism is based on a highly productive geometric constraint solver, a unique LEDAS solution available for licensing to third parties.

Although Dmitry received a lot of very positive references, the English version of his paper did not generate any readers discussion at isicad.net just because our modest English version of the portal does not enable commenting. But the original Russian publication of the paper provoked a hot intensive discussion which today, 3 weeks after the release, today celebrated the 100th comment with no clear signs of decay. (By the moment I finalized this post, there are already 104 comments).

The discussion has involved comparatively not so much internal technical issues of DM, but rather concentrated on its organizational context (e.g. should and can enterprise use one CAD or their diversity is practically inevitable?) and general opinions about how new technologies co-exist and compete with traditional solutions. In particular, some people from industry incline to believe that they should be a priori very suspicious to potential shortcomings of the innovations to leave vendors possibilities to emphasize advantages. Nevertheless, opponents of DM have multiply proposed the examples of models implemented in traditional CADs but, as they imagined, cannot be implemented with DM methods. Such examples were not so successful as expected:).

I can hardly recommend you to use Google translator for reading the discussion in question however, it seemed to impress Dmitry Ushakov who perhaps will write a special paper to analyze how people (mis)understand DM, which properties they mistakenly ascribe to the new technology and which advantages they do not recognize...

Best, 
David
@levin_david , @TheDavidLevin (Russian)

Which alcohol people drink in Russia

From left to right: beer, vodka, dry wine, strong (port)wine, home made vodka (samogon) 

Below: preferences depending of ages

Source: Russian Business Consulting (rbc.ru, August 4)