Next week, LEDAS CEO participates in the events of Bricsys, SolidWorks, and Dassault

Alexey Ershov, LEDAS  Chief Executive Officer, is going to take part in three conferences:

• ·         Bricsys International Conference 2014, 14 – 15 October, Barcelona,
• ·         16^th SolidWorks Russia Forum, 16 October, Moscow,
• ·         10^th 3DEXPERIENCE Forum 2014, 17 October, Moscow.

The trip from the Siberian headquarters of LEDAS to Europe (in particular, to Germany) and to the vendor conferences, is basically aimed at meetings with current and potential customers of LEDAS software development services.

Besides discussing service projects, Alexey will respond to recent requests to demonstrate and comment on a new generation LEDAS technology called LGC (LEDAS Geometry Comparison). Several companies have already become interested in the LGC technology, which has several important advantages over the few known marketable solutions. In particular, it is available as a component easily integrated into any engineering software, it demonstrates much better performance and reliability, and it also be released in a cloud version. The demo version of LGC can be downloaded  from the LEDAS web site.

LEDAS experts are currently working on analysis and specification of perspective new products (some of them – on top of LGC) inspired by the team experience and market demand. Alexey is going to discuss these new specifications with the partners and all those who are interested in diverse cooperation with LEDAS.

Being the top manager of LEDAS and a technological expert, Alexey Ershov is in the same time  known as a writer for the web portal www.isicad.ru / www.isicad.net which is a leading Russian edition in the domain of engineering software. Hopefully, he will find some time to share his impressions from the conferences with the isicad readers.

Today LEDAS released a must-have software component to compare 3D models

LEDAS Geometry Comparison (LGC) makes it easy to compare 3D models and clearly pinpoint all of the differences between them, which are shown as groups of modified faces. LGC maps topological elements of two 3D models and restores their associativity, allowing attributes, parameters, and constraints to be translated from one model to another. Built-in adjustment technology makes it possible for LGC to compare models that even were translated (moved) and rotated with respect to each other.

The software supports an extensible set of open and proprietary 3D part and assembly CAD formats. The cross-platform LGC code runs on 32- and 64-bit Windows and Linux, in both traditional and parallel MPI (message passing interface) versions. The LGC application programming interface is tuned for work in the cloud, making the integration of LGC into customers’ cloud-based systems as simple as possible.

See “The Benefits of LGC”, overview, sample models, demo, and more in and through "LEDAS Releases 3D Comparison Technology to the B2B Market. LGCcomponents available now for integration into engineering software":

LEDAS at COFES 2014: Intelligent DXF/DWG, Geometry Comparison, CAM, and The Company’s Key Points

In my previous post I presented Ivan Rykov, LEDAS CTO, a participant of upcoming COFES 2014.   

Today, Ivan is already on his way to Arizona with copies of four booklets, each of them describing 7 certain things related to some, but not all, key domains of the company's projects and skills. 

Want to know about intelligent DWG, advanced components of CAM, or really smart Geometry Comparison? Meet Ivan Rykov at COFES 2014.  

Seven major things you should and can learn about LEDAS at COFES 2014

Upcoming COFES 2014 as well as recently celebrated 15 years since the company foundation, inspired LEDAS   team to formulate what are the most important achievements that build LEDAS reputation and differentiate the company from other software R&D service providers. Seven topics have been identified and described: three related to in-house technologies, three – to big projects with the global market leaders, and one topic describing a project with a CAD community. All mentioned topics are presented in a dedicated new LEDAS booklet prepared for COFES 2014.

Want to know more? Ask LEDAS CTO Ivan Rykov at COFES 2014: April 24-27, 2014, Scottsdale, Arizona, The Scottsdale Plaza Resort. 

See about Ivan Rykov at LEDAS web site. Connect Ivan via LinkedIn or Skype ivanrykov or tweet to @ledasgroup. 

Since 2009, LEDAS representatives participate in COFES, Congress On the Future of Engineering Software. In 2010, together with the COFES/Cyon Research team, LEDAS organized COFES-isicad Forum in Moscow, and then became one of the main contributors of COFES Russia 2013.

Global CAM Market and LEDAS

A few days ago, LEDAS issued a press-release which announced that in the last financial year the company attracted ever more software development from global CAM market. It looks like the interest of the CAM market in LEDAS is not accidental: at least this can be somehow confirmed by a quote of Alexey Ershov, CEO LEDAS:

Unlike the CAD market in which a few dominant vendors earn billions of dollars a year, the CAM arena is spread among dozens of mid-size and hundreds of small companies providing niche solutions. This is due to the variety in capabilities of machines from many hardware vendors, and so this diversity requires development of an assortment of software, each one narrowly specialized. Machining companies put on the market brand new manufacturing devices and are often primarily focused on the hardware. Only later do they see that advanced software is needed to unleash the full potential of their hardware. These companies find it is easier to contract software development services from a company like LEDAS than to write it in-house. LEDAS has proven experience in this field, and so is highly qualified and more cost effective than for hardware firms to set up their own software development divisions, and then hire and train new employees within this area of specialization.

The LEDAS experience in providing services for the CAM domain is illustrated by a list of some relevant programming projects completed successfully by the company (more details and references can be received by request to info@ledas.com):

• Automated nest destruction and nest processing for composites and sheet metal,
• Distributed manufacturing order processing and material lifecycle management for composites and sheet metal,
• Motion simulation, and collision control for mold design,
• Path calculator for laser welding and engraving,
• Cylindrical feature processing for milling and drilling,
• Automated unloading of sheet material parts,
• Automatic migration of new GUIs for complex CAM systems.

As part of his upcoming September tour to meet several European customers of LEDAS, Alexey Ershov will attend a number of CAM-related exhibitions:

-  18, Wednesday, Stuttgart, Composites Europe,

-  19, Thursday, Essen, SCHWEISSEN & SCHNEIDEN,

-  20, Friday, EMO Hannover. 

Vladimir Malukh (1966 - 2013)

I regret to inform you of the death of Vladimir Malukh (1966 - 2013), one of the most recognized experts in engineering software of the Russian market, the author of the unique monograph "Introduction to CAD", and of about 200 papers at isicad.ru and isicad.net, and many other publications. 

Vladimir was one of the key members of the LEDAS and isicad teams. 

See Vladimir’s biography in English and more detailed and undated biography in Russian (with  a full list of Vladimir's isicad publications).

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.

What is more important than a technical result of ASCON + Bricsys + LEDAS => KOMPAS-3D VDM ?

Even from a technical perspective, implementation of the direct modeling module for a mass Russian MCAD KOMPAS-3D is a non-routine event. If you are a skeptic not responsible for the success of your business, you may doubt the benefits and prospects of direct modeling as much as you like. If, however, your interests and responsibilities include enhancing competitive ability of your solutions on the global market, you cannot be behind synchronous technology, Fusion approach, Creo Direct, etc.  To stay ahead will be even better.

At the end of my message, I give links to learn about technological, historic and organizational aspects of developing variational direct modeling technology (VDM), conceived by LEDAS. However, it is more important for me to emphasize something different rather than technical aspects of our achievements. It was effectually expressed in private communications by a very reputable figure on the Russian market of engineering software: “I am not apt to underestimate the breakthrough nature of the event. It’s a real hassle to make arrangements with a single actor, but the three hardcore competitors for CAD, kernels and solvers worked it out very well. The world is changing, and this high-profile matter deserves to be communicated to the people…”.

The story has its own heroes. On the part of ASCON – this is, first of all, Vladimir Panchenko, one of the leading ASCON production engineers and analysts, who has studied capabilities of VDM technology from all sides. He made the key contribution to architecture of its efficient integration into KOMPAS. Vladimir is the KOMPAS-VDM project leader on behalf of ASCON; combining in-depth competence, insistence on high standards and enthusiasm. He continuously supported the project and will support its advancement. 

On the part of LEDAS - the project leader, Alexei Istomin, a capable young mathematician and software engineer, who has become an effective, up-and-coming manager in course of the project progress.

On the part of Bricsys – this is, first of all, an outstanding founder and CEO of the company, Erik de Keyser, for who the long-term strategic interests are much more important than any superficial considerations about localized benefits and tactical competition, related to possessing VDM technology, LGS geometric solver used in VDM, and implementing VDM into the company’s own CAD - Bricscad. By the way, I recommend you to follow the work of the next Bricsys conference in Amsterdam where Eric is going to announce new developments - likely not less important than a year ago.    

I would like to specifically emphasize the role of Kolomna, a small town in Moscow area which is a key place of ASCON’s software development projects. Apart from Vladimir Panchenko, this unique town is the work place of, for instance, one of the principal ASCON founders, as they say - "the KOMPAS Mum", the Head of the KOMPAS-3D development unit in Kolomna, and just a charming woman – Tatyana Yankina (see "ASCON Faces"); as well as Nikolai Golovanov, the author of KOMPAS-3D geometric kernel, who published several fundamental books on software engineering, an industry classic. 

It is impossible not to mention the not-yet-fully-exposed role of the phenomenal Kolomna pastille in the success of ASCON technology (see the picture of it at the end of the story). Even in mid of XIX century, the most famous Russian composer Peter  Tchaikovsky used to come to Kolomna to taste this pastille and probably to be inspired for his Swan Lake ballet. Today, the town has an excellent museum of pastille which always attracts a lot of tourists. Who knows maybe specific ingredients of the local pastille nourish the developers of KOMPAS:). 

Kolomna is certainly very special, but the decision about the ASCON project was obviously made in St Petersburg at the ASCON HQ; and we must emphasize the innovative courage of the company top executives, which has been robustly unfolding lately. As you can see, the project is transcontinental (A - Novosibirsk, LEDAS, B - Kolomna, ASCON-KOMPAS, C - St Petersburg, D - Gent, Belgium, Bricsys): 

You can learn about variational direct modeling and its implementation as well as about transition of VDM to Bricsys and its life there from

• Variational Direct Modeling: How to Keep Design Intent in History-Free CAD 
• Direct Modeling - Who and Why Needs It? A Review of Competitive Technologies   
• Adding Intelligence to Direct Modeling   
• How to Express Design Intent in Rhino 3D   
• MenhirsNV Acquires Intellectual Property Rights from LEDAS   
• HowDirect Modeling Transforms Cinderella into the Princess .  

One of the dozens of types of the Kolomna pastille (a nice side-effect of the ASCON-LEDAS contract): 

ASCON holds its Forum "White Nights" in a place perfectly suitable for the next COFES-Russia

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: 

In the world-famous park founded by Peter the Great (15 minutes of walk from the hotel): 

And here is the key point of the place:

LEDAS makes JETCAM to work 50 times faster

JETCAM International s.a.r.l (Monaco) recently announced  a simultaneous launch of updates to its two flagship products – JETCAM Expert CADCAM and nesting software for sheet metal and composite users, and the Premium version of JETCAM Order Controller (JOC), which provides remote ordering, geometry creation and nesting for JETCAM Expert.

Version 16.23.02 of JETCAM Expert  is the start of several end user releases planned for 2012 focussing on punching for sheet metal. The new release boasts a 50 x improvement when performing web nesting due to a completely re-written underlying core. It also includes the recently announced Prima-Power XML postprocessor for Tulus based controllers, along with many other feature enhancements across the board.

One of the key improvements in this version is a significant progress in the functional performance of web nesting (placing parts on the sheet so that, after cutting punching method, "skeleton" remains connected). The development of a new algorithmic kernel for the new version was outsourced to LEDAS whose team succeeded to accelerate related functionality of the previously already used functionality by 50 times based on the completely rewritten core algorithms. 

JETCAM Order Controller v8.50 provides a remote method of ordering components or assemblies within JETCAM Expert, and this latest version provides a raft of benefits and improvements. The CAD import engine has been completely rewritten and now supports JETCAM Expert’s Single Component Automatic Processing (SCAP). This allows JOC users to remotely and automatically create geometry files from multiple CAD drawings and tool them for a punching or profiling machine with just a few clicks of a mouse. Upon receiving instructions from JOC, JETCAM will automatically process the queued files and report back once done. Users of JETCAM’s Remote Control Processing (RCP) module for JETCAM also benefit from a new streamlined interface. JOC also includes a comprehensive reports designer and generator, allowing for customized reports to be easily designed and implemented.

JETCAM was founded in 1986 to develop and market software systems for computer numerical control programming of punching and cutting machines used in sheet metal fabrication and composite cutting. By 2012, has over 12,000 licences granted to enterprises in more than 80 countries around the globe. Its customers include such well-known names as Embraer, Bombardier Aerospace and Red Bull Technology. JETCAM is a true customer-driven company: development of CrossTrack, a system to manage orders, materials and assemblies, was initiated upon customer requests. Together with JETCAM Expert it forms an automated order processing system that independently generates a CNC code for any machine.

At the end of 2010, JETCAM started transfer of its software product development to LEDAS. Today, a big team of LEDAS developers is continuously and successfully working within several JETCAM projects. 

See also: "From the Prague Spring to a Siberian summer" and Related press-release of the JETCAM International .

LEDAS announces its involvement in development of Russia’s 3D kernel

Just want to give you these links:
LEDAS Assists STANKIN to Develop a New 3D Modeling Kernel (press-release)
Russian National 3D Kernel (overview by Dmitry Ushakov)
LEDAS: How our Company is Involved in Developing Russian Geometric Kernel (my interview with LEDAS managers).

They have had a chance to see SolidWorks 2015

Every month a Russian CAD/PLM web portal isicad.ru produces a virtual release by publishing a market review, distributing an editorial column, designing a special cover page, composing a pdf with the most interesting articles of the last month, and other. Although all this is intended for those who can read Russian, I hope some of the others will not consider as a spam the information I am giving below.  

The yesterday-issued cover page of February was inspired by SolidWorks World 2012 and obviously by “Back to the Future”. The key title under the picture says: “What will happen with SW in the future?”:

By today, our collection of monthly cover pages contains 40 pictures always intended to reflect some important monthly market developments: please take a look at them here (some of them are flash animated). Our monthly reviews are typically composed by Vladimir Malukh, the LEDAS/isicad leading CAD expert. His review from February “SolidWorks 2015 will be implemented!” as well as the full long list of his articles since 2007 can be found here.

My February editorial was called “Love for a software system: is this the engine or brake of its progress?”, the title inspired by a recent Randall Newton’s remark about the problems SW has with its customers who adore the system. The links to my previous monthly papers can be found at this page.

The monthly pdf digest as usual contains the most visited articles (but not news neither press-releases), the 105 pages issue of February is here.

If you decide to use any automatic tools for translation of, say, my editorials, please don’t be too surprised or disappointed: usually these texts are quite sensitive to the context/ discourse of Russia and national communities.  

    

Note that the isicad project also supports a modest English version of the isicad portal. At this web site you can easily find some English articles/reviews reflecting developments of the Russian and CIS market. Recently I’ve outlined this web site in my paper “NURBS, BIM, orRevolution: which topics are most attractive for the readership?”. This is a small collection of the English cover pages (see the page with this set of pictures):

1600+ pages of almost the whole truth about all of us: The Russian PLMpedia

The Russian Web Encyclopedia PLMpedia.ru was founded by LEDAS during the preparation of the forum isicad-2008 as the online version of the vocabulary section of the monograph "The Encyclopedia of PLM» - the book which gradually became a rarity. To give you an idea about this web site, I will show some screenshots to begin with a front page whose some components randomly change from time to time (click to enlarge all pictures):

Over the past four years, PLMpedia became well ahead of its printed version, now in contains more than 1,600 articles (all in Russian) on engineering software​​ divided into more than thirty subject categories. Very probably, one of the most valuable sections is "Industry Terms and Concepts", a fragment of which is shown in this figure:

Now, a fragment from one of the largest categories "Vendors and their products":

In addition to the descriptions of products, technologies, services, and terminology, most of the articles contain references to the vendor websites. Here is a sample article "3D Geometric Kernel" relating to the "Industry Terms and Concepts" (the section which was substantially enriched thanks to the information kindly provided by CIMdata):

Note that at the end of encyclopedia articles there usually are links to relevant fresh publications at isicad.ru. Such links can also be found in other sections, for example, in the sections that describe companies (here - ASCON):

Obviously one of the largest section is about products (note: placement of banners at isicad.ru automatically implies their putting at  PLMpedia):

"Persons" section is also supported (but worthy of a radical extension). An example is an article about John Walker published at PLMpedia long ago and these days widely circulated in the web due to the 30th anniversary of Autodesk:

We try to carefully maintain and expand the section that represents the Internet and paper media including analytics & consulting, here is a a fragment, I hope, in fact, all are presented:

Today in Russia, and, perhaps, and in the world (could somebody correct me?), there is no analogue of such PLM Encyclopedia which by the way is attended quite actively. All comments, corrections, contributions, recommendations are welcome to info@plmpedia.ru or info@isicad.ru.

Novosibirsk IT Center for 100+ high tech companies inagurated yesterday

Yesterday, the Russian Federal Minister of Tele- and mass communications Igor Shchegolev inaugurated the first part of the IT Center (Tekhnopark) in Novosibirsk Scientific Center:

Here is the opening procedure: the minister says:

 Alexey Ershov, LEDAS CEO, receives a certificate which confirms that LEDAS (one  of 100+ high tech companies) is a resident of the Tekhnopark: 

As soon as the minister left the meeting, people ate a huge cake shaped as the building just opened:

 and could enjoy a kind of break dance show:

As for the offices, they are under intensive bottom-up and 24x7 construction: LEDAS plans to move into the Tekhnopark by this summer

Here you may find some official information, e.g. the construction was initiated in late summer of 2010, so far one billion rubles (~ $30M) was invested (about 2/3 from federal budget and 1/3 - from the regional)...  

Brief English verion of the web-site of the above mentioned ministry /  

One relatively inexpensive way to change your life: both in CAD and in general

A 2011-year record of a number of COFES-participants from CIS can now be overcome. Almost at New Year midnight Brad Holtz has updated a current list of participants  of the April Arizona event, now the list includes:

- Three representatives of ASCON who have already visited Arizona in 2011 – CEO M. Bogdanov, head of innovation department O. Zykov, and ASCON’s key technologist V.Panchenko,

- LEDAS CEO and leading technologist Alexey Ershov, and

- a bright CIS expert in AEC&BIM Alexander Bausk.

For the Russian participants, COFES-2011 was rather fruitful (see "Get back! Personal Impressions from COFES-2011"), note in particular some concrete contracts: ASCON-LEDAS (see "LEDAS Implements Variational Direct Modeling in KOMPAS-3D") and ASCON-Lightworks (see "New KOMPAS-3D V13 from ASCON integrates Lightworks Artisan") to say nothing about a lot of indirect value which for sure will be materialized in future. 

As far as I know, a number of the participants from CIS may still increase, in any case, I recommend such Russian CAD/PLM vendors as Top Systems, NanoSoft and ADEM  to seriously consider their visiting Arizona in April which might be very useful for global development of these companies. Just after his registration  for COFES-2012. A.Bausk modestly said on Twitter "Four hours before the New Year, I have done one life-changing thing: if everything comes out, wait for my tweets from a very important CAD-event".