Nine participants from Russian ASCON, Fidesys, LEDAS, and TopSystems will attend COFES 2013 in Arizona

The number of COFES participants from Russia and CIS is constantly increasing. Vladimir Malukh from LEDAS-isicad was the first Russian expert who in 2009 visited COFES when the event was hardly known in Russia and the CIS; see Vladimir's isicad paper "COFES – Wish you were here".  

Awareness of COFES drastically increased in Russia and the CIS when in fall 2010 Cyon Research together with LEDAS organized a COFES-isicad event in Moscow with a keynote and general active participation of Brad Holtz.  

In 2011, a list of COFES participants included five persons from Russian companies: three - from ASCON, one - from a multi-vendor reseller Consistent Software, and Dmitry Ushakov, who at that time was LEDAS CEO; see Dmitry's isicad paper "Get back! (Personal Impressions from COFES-2011)".

Active participation of ASCON in 2011 was not casual. The company is the largest Russian CAD and PLM vendor with a well-developed MCAD KOMPAS 3D and intensively extending PLM set; it successfully competes with Autodesk in the Russian & CIS market. In 2010-2011 ASCON began to internationalize its marketing and partnership activity as well as to invest into development of SaaS, mobility, and other hot trends. It is at COFES 2011 where the managers of ASCON established close partnerships for example with Lightwork: see my interview with Clive Davies: “ASCON is proving to be the ideal partner for Lightwork Design“.  This direction of ASCON’s development continued quite successfully which is illustrated, for example, in some isicad-papers such as «ASCON Releases DEXMA as a Competitor to PLM 360» , «ASCON’s Mobilezation: My impressions from the “White Nights” Forum», and other.

In 2012, ASCON again sent its three managers to COFES, and now – in 2013, CEO Maxim Bogdanov will attend Arizona for the third time, now accompanied by Sergey Evsikov, Vice-President, Sales (left) and Alexander Golikov, Founder (right):

Currently, ASCON feels like a mature international actor. The company is providing technical assistance to COFES Russia 2013  to be held in St. Petersburg six weeks after the event in Arizona. Today, ASCON is emphasizing its openly distributed original geometric kernel C3D  – the foundation of KOMPAS 3D, its above mentioned cloud PLM DEXMA, and its traditional-style large PLM+ERP environment.      

In 2012, COFES invited six persons from Russia and the CIS. Along with the people from ASCON, there were Dmitry Kondakov from IRISOFT (a large Russian VAR of PTC and some other vendors), Alexander Bausk from Ukrainian Nuclear Structures Research Lab, and Alexey Ershov, LEDAS CEO – see his isicad paper ”Arizona Dream: A detailed informal report on COFES-2012”.

Now about COFES 2013 which starts approximately in 4 weeks. You can meet there a record number of persons from Russia (seven). Two guys from ASCON were already mentioned above.

Another participant is Vladimir A. Levin,  ScD, professor, Moscow State University, department of Mechanics and Mathematics, Computational Mechanics. 

Vladimir’s main field of interest is developing mathematical models of strength analysis of bodies under finite strains. Total number of publications: over 235, including 4 monographs. Vladimir is the founder and the head of Fidesys – a start-up which positions itself as a provider of a new generation CAE system for strengthen analysis and associated problems. 


After my blogpost was published, Anatoly Vershinin, Fidesys CTO, joined Vladimir in his visit to Arizona. 

There will be three persons from Top Systems: CEO Sergey Kuraksin, CTO Sergey Kozlov, and Sergey Bikulov, executive director (from left to right):.

Top Systems's set of traditional CAD+PLM+ERP solutions is quite well developed and  recognized in the Russia / CIS market. The key product of Top Systems, its MCAD called T-FLEX, is characterized as one of the most developed parametric system in the world market: see a detailed paper by S.Kuraksin and S.Kozlov “The Power of T-FLEX CAD Parametric Modeling”: Part I and Part II. Interestingly a paper which compared  T-FLEX and SolidWorks (the comparison made by a Top Systems’ partner in Poland) has become and until now is the most visited isicad publication since launching the portal.

It is important to mention that Top Systems is actively involved (both in management and development ) into the building of a new geometric 3D modeler RGK within a big project funded by the Russian Government and being implemented by a distributed team from several development centers of Russia. I believe that today, by visiting COFES, Top Systems is making an active step towards international market.

This time, LEDAS will be represented by the company’s COO Nikolay Snytnikov – PhD, who despite his young age (30) has already passed through a hard many-year school of participation in a cool outsourcing project for Dassault Systems (as a developer and manager), and currently he is a manager of the LEDAS part of RGK - the Russian Geometric Kernel. Within RGK, LEDAS is responsible for the development  of Boolean operations,  fast NURBS library,  some parallelization tasks, and other hard problems (see “LEDAS Experts: How our Company is Involved in Developing Russian Geometric Kernel” by A.Ershov and N.Snytnikov). Nikolay's background is in parallel computing so his visit to NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference 2012 resulted not only in a series of best-read isicad reportages but seems to bring useful knowledge to the RGK project. Since LEDAS does not compete with any CAD vendor, the company is a partner of both Top Systems and ASCON; the latter has used LEDAS service to integrate direct modeling facilities into KOMPAS 3D and is now relying on  LEDAS support in distribution and commercialization of the C3D kernel.   

As an internationally recognized provider of components (such as geometric solvers, direct modeling modules, and other) and highly-qualified software development services, LEDAS is well-known to the global market. After selling its IP to Bricsys in 2011, LEDAS has been  focusing on services, and recently the company shareholders have established an US business entity to better serve its clients worldwide. On the other hand, competence, skills, experience, and creativity enabled LEDAS experts to formulate a number of new project/technology ideas related to some hot topics of engineering software such as interoperability, etc. Nikolay Snytnikov is going to Arizona to strengthen some existing contacts, to seek for the new service contracts, and to look for the partners interested in joint business projects. As a member of the editorial board and a fruitful writer for isicad.ru, Nilolay will also send us his reports from the Arizona event.

Two Russian Geometric Kernels will be presented in detail at COFES Russia 2013

I'm sure most of you know what is COFES - Congress On the Future of Engineering Software. May be some of you have participated in this unique event, which since 2000 has been  organized in Arizona by Cyon Research. Probably regional COFES events are less known; they are held in the regions that either can provide new valuable experience to the global community or can perceive new development impulse from the global community, or both. In autumn 2010, an experimental regional COFES Russia event was held in Moscow together with the isicad Forum, and a couple of months later COFES Israel was organized in Tel-Aviv.

The next regional COFES event, COFES Russia 2013 – now in a strictly traditional COFES format – will be held in Peterhof, a world famous suburb of St.Petersburg (its key elements  were created according to the plans of Peter the Great) . The registration  is already opened.  Let us take a quick look at the agenda which is being steadily extended step by step.

First, according to the regular structure of COFES events, you can see a number of Analyst and User Briefings. Without going into the details of this genre, I'll just give a list of the names of moderators and some of the topics: Allan Behrens (Taxal Limited) - Model-Based Engineering, Peter Bilello (CIMdata) - Software Delivery: Moving to the Cloud and Changing Business Models, Nick Nisbet (AEC3) - Learning from the BIM Revolution in the UK, Jon Peddie (Jon Peddie Research), Jim Brown (Tech Clarity), Chris De Neef (Fast Track Consulting), Alex Bausk (PSACEA) - Model-Based Engineering in the Context of AEC and BIM, Peter Thorne (Cambashi) - ALM and PLM Grow Closer, Marina Korol - What Mandated BIM Might Mean for Russia, Phares Noel (Cyon Research) - Integrating of Point Clouds into the Flow of Design and Engineering…

Second, you can see a panel discussion “Perspectives on PLM” moderated by Brad Holtz, the President of Cyon Research and COFES:

Third, the agenda includes a keynote of Jesse Devitte (Borealis Ventures) and Tech Soft 3D Customer Event: why not to find new points of investments and new clients on the definitely very active market of Russia and CIS?

I want to pay special attention to the forthcoming presentation of two Russian geometric kernels.

One of them is C3D - an original kernel of ASCON, which has been for many years successfully used within the company’s flagship product KOMPAS 3D, and recently, as a component, has been brought to the open market ("ASCON Releases C3D Kernel for the CAD Component Market").  The kernel will be presented in particular at the Labs Customer Meeting to be held in the morning of May 30 (COFES Russia will be officially opened in the afternoon). Note that ASCON will also use one of the key COFES options called Technology Suite Briefing which provides an opportunity to openly discuss C3D  (and maybe other technology achievements of the company) with all participants of the event who want to know the technology and business details.

Another Russian kernel  RGK  (Russian Geometric Kernel) is currently being constructed within a national project with a leading role of Top Systems. (see “Russian National 3D Kernel”). Top Systems is known by its advanced 3D parametric CAD TFLEX (see "The Power of T-FLEX CAD Parametric Modeling") and intensive development of PLM (see the above mentioned PLM panel discussion).  At COFES Russia, Top Systems will also use the opportunities of a technology suite briefing. In addition, Russian 3D Kernel will be discussed at one of the 90-minute roundtable discussions.

Both ASCON and Top Systems have very qualified development teams that confirm a well-known fundamental math and engineering culture of Russia at a full scale. Both companies are increasingly investing in their global marketing, and COFES Russia 2013 provides one more opportunity to present their offerings internationally. (Note that ASCON and probably Top Systems will participate also in COFES 2013 in Arizona). We are looking forward to seeing interesting discussions and maybe heated debates.  

LEDAS is always (especially after selling its IP for the component products to Bricsys) lucky of keeping a position of not being a competitor to any vendors. In particular, the company is a reseller (better to say - VAR) of ASCON’s C3D  ("LEDAS to Distribute ASCON’s C3D Modeling Kernel Internationally") and at the same time is an active developer of RGK (see "LEDAS Assists STANKIN to Develop a New 3D Modeling Kernel" and 

"LEDAS Experts: How our Company is Involved in Developing Russian Geometric Kernel".
Three or four leading LEDAS experts will participate in COFES Russia 2013. 

As for the environment and cultural program of COFES Russia 2013, you can find some hints in the agenda, take a look at the pictures in my blog, or of course look in the Internet for a huge amount of information about Peterhof and St.Peterburg.

Direct modeling and armored troop-carrier

A news about Bricscad V12 which has brought direct modeling to Linux was couple days ago exhaustively promoted by a Bricsys news, posts by Ralph Grabowski and Deelip Menezes, and certainly by many others. You will not be too much surprised by my impulse to proudly remind that the underlying technology came from LEDAS - as it was formally fixed by a Bricsys-LEDAS deal from the last October.

According to that deal, a team of former LEDAS developers headed by Dmitry Ushakov, joined Bricsys software development ecosystem in the guise of a Bricsys daughter establishment - a newco called Bricsys Technologies Russia (BTR). BTR team is currently renting a part of the LEDAS offices so that both teams, although definitely working separately, can fruitfully and friendly contact.

Now I have a kind of linguistic task: to explain you a title of this post and a meaning of the picture hanging at the door of the BTR office:

Well, as you can see, the picture shows an ATC (armored troop-carrier) which in Russian is "BroneTranspoteR" (bronya = armor) - known to everyone with native Russian as BTR. Judging by a series of Bricscad V12 releases, this BTR-image is much inspiring for Bricsys Technologies Russia which is very fruitfully contributing to the recent and future results of Bricsys.

A linguistic aspect is sometimes much easier, for example, take a look at another door: the compass hints that it is about the LEDAS  project related to KOMPAS 3D of ASCON.   

Today in Russia is actually CAD Day

In particular Autodesk CIS Forum in Moscow and Day of Machine Constructors of ASCON have just been opened. The events are reported by well-known bloggers:

@olegshilovitsky olegshilovitsky 

#aforum Autodesk director in CIS Alexey Ryzhov is talking about mobile Internet and cloud just from the beginning.

@cadovod  #denmash #ASCON ...

Today ASCON holds its event simultaniously in 22+ cities of CIS. Cadovod tweets from Yaroslavl. 

ASCON to distribute a full scale 3D CAD for $50

Today, ASCON, a leading Russian CAD vendor announced that its powerful 3D CAD KOMPAS-3D V13 will be distributed under the name KOMPAS-3D Home for 1490 RUR ($50).  This version has absolutely no restrictions but is not permitted for commercial use. The license is valid for 1 year and can be prolonged.  

The key point is that distribution (which will be started in October) of the Home version will be done by "1C" company - a leading Russian vendor of small and medium range ERP. With its really huge distribution network, 1C has installed its bookkeeping  products at practically each company, organization, and institution of Russia and CIS. According to IDC, revenues of 1C in Russia and CIS in 2009 were between that of SAP and Oracle.

Source http://bit.ly/mV0xiA  

ASCON web site

1C web site

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)

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…

isicad.ru N80: Cloud CAD Against Drawing Board

The monthly overview by Vladimir Malukh from the just issued N80 of isicad.ru (in Russian) include in partucular:

- during the company press-conference, ASCON organized a competition between its cloud KOMPAS 3D and a drawing board,

- The Bolshoi Theater has licensed a number of Autodesk products; in April-November the "Russian Community of Autodesk Users" will attend 13 cities of CIS to meet local users,

- INTERMECH released a unique system which can find geometrically similar shapes for Autodesk Inventor, Solid Works, Solid Edge, NX, ProEngineer и KOMPAS 3D,

- for the first time in history SolidWorks in Russia will be supervised by DS...

See Vladimir's review of March in Russian and google-translated.

N80 aminated cover page reflects the above mentioned news about Bolshoi. You don't need to know Russian language to catch the essenses of a lot of previous cover pages (click to enlarge - sometimes animated).

Does SolidWorks Have Competitors in the Russian Market?

SolidWorks is rather successful in Russia, the fact which was confirmed at SWW 2011 and also at the previous such events. This, as well as probably new relations between DS and SW, for the first time in history resulted in establishing a position of the head of DSSW representative in Russia. Pavel Bruk (39) who was appointed to this position is a kind of unique guy: his CV includes education in airspace design, Computervision, Innovation and Design Center in Liverpool University, Unigraphics (incl. PDM, working in Germany,…), Intel, Autodesk, Bentley Systems, and at last (since Jan 2011) – DS.

In a recently published big interview for a Russian language magazine CAD/CAM/CAE Observer, Pavel made a series of sharp statements that many people will definitely not agree. Here are some fragments from the interview.

What are some explicit functional advantages of SolidWorks in comparison with KOMPAS-3D?

This is exactly the case when it’s reasonable to consider functional differences. At present KOMPAS-3D is lagging behind at least, by 5 years. The existing KOMPAS 3D functionality, accepted methods of work, the geometric kernel- all this is non-competitive in comparison with systems of the SolidWorks class...

In a recent interview to our magazine, Eugene Lesnikov from Autodesk CIS said that it was not reasonable to compare Inventor with SolidWorks and SolidEdge, since Inventor has no "big brother" who would inhibit its growth. What do you think - as specialist who worked earlier for SPLM and Autodesk? Perhaps Inventor should then be compared in functionality with CATIA and NX?

I am somewhat surprised to hear such words from a man who definitely knows what is PLM (E.Lesnikov was earlier working in IBM with DS: DL)...Rather, Inventor has a problem with his "little brother"- AutoCAD. We have repeatedly witnessed how in the case of financial problems at Autodesk, all the powers and resources were trasferred to support platform business. Therefore, investments into Inventor are from time to time in danger ...Besides, Autodesk became involved in things uncharacteristic for engineers. Adding Alias and CAE (Moldflow, Algor, Blue) is an unsuccessful attempt to capture a part of the market with a help of Inventor…

It would be interesting to know your opinion about a couple SE-NX?

As you know, Siemens does not publish any data on such sales. In my estimation, Solid Edge is very much lost ground, especially in Russia. Perhaps, Siemens will try to catch up. It will be interesting to watch this attempt: perhaps Solid Edge can bite off a part of the Inventor market...

At the picture above: Pavel Bruk at COFES-Russia / isicad-2011.

The interview in Russian

Google translated version