These days, I am at the ASCON's Forum which the company is holding for its customers at Peterhof, an outskirt of Saint Petersburg. This is really a great place, just look a Wikipedia pictures and characteristic which starts with "it is a series of palaces and gardens located in Saint Petersburg, Russia, laid out on the orders of Peter the Great. These Palaces and gardens are sometimes referred as the "Russian Versailles". The palace-ensemble along with the city center is recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
ASCON, the biggest Russian CAD/PLM company, holds its Forum for the 7th time. The key participants of "White Nights" are top managers from the Russian and CIS industries. Among the topics of the Forum, there are: optimization of the business processes, best practices from the industries, recent progress in the main ASCON's products and solutions, and other. During the last couple years ASCON, still remaining the leading Russian CAD vendor and the only competitor of Autodesk at the local market, becomes more and more dynamic and looking at the global market: establishing its office in Germany, actively participating in COFES, and integrating some Western solutions into its products.
It is at COFES in Arizona that ASCON's managers agreed on cooperation with Lightwork Design, the world’s leading supplier of rendering solutions for advanced 3D Computer Graphics. By today, the Artisan product from Lightworks is already integrated into KOMPAS-3D V13 - the key MCAD solution of ASCON. Clive Davies, Business Development Director at LightWork Design, is a special guest and invited speaker of the “White Nights” and I have had a pleasant opportunity to prepare an interview with Clive, see "Clive Davies: ASCON is proving to be the ideal partner for Lightwork Design".
By the way, it's also in Arizona a cooperation between ASCON and LEDAS has been materialized and lead to the project of incorporating into KOMPAS some key directmodeling facilities based on the LEDAS Geometric Solver (LGS).
The Forum starts in couple hours in an nice hotel "New Peterhof" and I hope to report on its key issues. I came to Peterhof yesterday morning to have more time to visit some local places of interest that I had seen long ago in Soviet times... Today, the place is really a very comfortable touristic site with a carefully maintained environment, a lot of restaurants, an excellent Wi-Fi all around the town, and so on. Look at some pictures below: why, after the firstsuccessful experience, not to organize the next COFES-Russia here in Peterhof?
The hotel is near the pond - over the trees, the church is 50 meters from the hotel entrance:
Here, in the pond:
And this is also at the pond, 70 meters from the hotel:
