Autodesk, DS, Geomagic, IBM, Kubotek, PTC, Siemens, and other at COFES-Israel

The COFES (Congress on the Future of the Engineering Software) events that are annually held in April in Arizona by Cyon Research are quite well known as probably the only international multi-vendor conference with no direct marketing flavor. If you don’t know COFES visit www.cofes.com. This year the main global conference was complemented by two regional forums: in Moscow (in September) and in Tel Aviv, Israel (last week).

The Forum in Tel-Aviv was attended by about 80 people who represented all CAD/PLM

market leaders and a lot of interesting companies including international analytical agencies.

There were fourteen 12-minutes talks (including opening and concluding speeches) sectioned into four sessions. 45-minute breaks enabled some interesting informal meetings, for example I succeeded to talk to those 5 persons with whom I had had plans to meet.

Condensed format of both forums in Russia and Israel could not provide time for one of the key points of the Arizona COFES, its possibility to talk during outdoor walks. Here in Hilton Tel-Aviv the outdoor could be implemented by coming out to the terrace and feel envy to those relaxing on the beach – which was especially exciting for those who came to Israel from snowy and frosty countries.

All the presentations were quite interesting, but I would give the first three places to correspondingly: Brian Shepherd (PTC), Chris De Neef (Fast Track Consulting, Belgium), and Eitan Yudilevich (BIRD Foundation, Israel).

In his concluding remarks, Brad Holtz characterized further COFES plans: for sure the next key event will be the full-scale 3-day COFES-2011 conference "Innovations in the Face of Complexity" in Arizona.

My brief characteristics of all the presentations along with 17 photos are given in the isicad.net article "Innovations Should be More Practical, Less Political. COFES-Israel Forum Report". There one can also read my comparison of COFES-Israel and COFES-Russia.

One point from that comparison is the following. Today in Russia, the topic of innovation is politically loaded, it goes top down and is mainly monopolized by the state. Therefore, people in labs and in small companies who practice innovations, automatically - according to the fundamentals of Russian culture, consider and interpret innovation ironically if not worse. However no politics, profanation, or irony can cancel the processes objectively demanded by society and history. I’d prefer to see a situation in Russia when practicioners consider innovation as not only politics and discuss such topics more seriously and pragmatically. At the same time, I don’t want to be considered naïve. Obviously such general and global topics like innovation, independently on countries, are inevitably politicized and give opportunities for additional profits to politicians and analysts: be such profits materialized or reputational or other. Really important is what then happens with innovation itself...

See also official page of COFES Israel and related posts in Oleg Shilovitsky blog.

LEDAS about ST-3 from Siemens

In addition to the common natural interest to Synchronous Technology, LEDAS-isicad has its reasons.

First, LEDAS develops its own version of direct modeling - both incorporating it into some applications and providing corresponding technology to the CAD vendors who wish to increase competitiveness of the systems they produce. Second, at isicad.ru we regularly test new capabilities of the latest versions of popular CADs and publish (in Russian) our opinions as for example "3D marches en masse with AutoCAD 2011", "New gimmicks in Inventor 2011", "On-line KOMPAS – in the isicad’s pocket", "From idea to result with SolidWorks-2011", and others.

So it's clear that for long we have wanted to practically see what is Solid Edge with synchronous technology. Unfortunately, out attempt to obtain a trial license for this product was not successful: representatives of the office of Siemens PLM Software in Russia refused to grant such license to us, explaining that staff members of the editorial board of isicad.ru also work for LEDAS.

But recently we were happy to read a detailed characteristics of ST-3 in a remarkable series of dozen posts of Deelip Menezes. Information Deelip shared with the readers have been sufficient enough for Dmitry Ushakov to arrive to some conclusions about ST3, which he formulated in his article published in Russian the next day after Deelip's publications and today published in English translation "Synchronous Technology: the Third Attempt".

Dmitry's paper is not just a retelling of ST-3 features: it characterizes fundamental constituents of direct modeling as a general new generation approach, analyzes consequences of combination of procedural and declarative features, formulates a hypothesis about what is really done in ST-3, gives a list of references including comparatively early research publications, and other.

The paper also compares ST-3 with the approach of LEDAS, in particular Dmitry says:

"... The idea (of the LEDAS approach) is that the end-users work directly with geometry – bypassing the intermediate level in the form of features. In particular, our users can manually set any geometric or dimensional constraint between any geometric or dimensional constraint between any faces, edges, and vertices of a boundary model. What is even more important that our system can automatically recognize most of geometric constraints (parallelism, perpendicularity, coplanarity, coaxiality, tangency, equal distances and radii) and take them into account performing direct modeling operations".

The LEDAS approach is emphasized in the title of one of the previous Dmitry's publications: "Variational Direct Modeling: How to Keep Design Intent in History-Free CAD, 2008, LEDAS Ltd".

Dmitry concludes his paper with the questions: "Synchronous technology is our future but why it has to come in the same package with an obsolete apparatus of history-based parametric modeling? These two approaches can hardly be combined due to significant conceptual differences, and as result a composed solution is controversial and unnatural for the users. Can it happen that Siemens disappoints its users with an excessive complexity of its combined solution? Would it be better to keep synchronous technology in its pure form – without linking to the traditional approach? We will not get the answers to these questions now, but Siemens solution has paved the way to other vendors who may prefer different strategies for launching s similar apparatus. That remains to be seen. In LEDAS we intend to be actively involved in the process".

PS. Perhaps this article will encourage Siemens to grant isicad/LEDAS a trial license for a new version of Solid Edge.

Terminology and maturity of the CAD/PLM market

Oleg Shilovitsky wrote in his comment: "I hardly believe Autodesk will go toward PLM route. At least Carl Bass will need to withdraw his "anti-PLM rap" video from youtube first". For a more detailed Oleg’s opinion on the topic see his recent post PLM for Individuals – Integrate or Die?.

I think every person and every company have all rights to name themselves as they like (of course being careful with orange rectangles and so on). But perhaps mature industries and other domains of human activity should somehow follow an example of science – its fundamental resting upon a system of notions and standardized terminology. If PLM, digital prototyping, and other notions are already sufficiently defined then the community can more or less precisely determine whether somebody is inside or outside, moving toward or outward… – independently on a whatever video at youtube…

Following the example of science does not mean that we should artificially and arbitrarily define and freeze notions and terminology before they naturally become stable and mainly accepted: a process of elaboration/improvement/adjustment/refinement of terminology is natural and inevitable for any evolving branch of human knowledge. On the other hand, playing marketing-terminology games is something that can hardly help increasing maturity of industry.

My opinion is that the notions in question are far from the final definition, but they, on the other hand, are already sufficiently defined to enable understanding of whether Autodesk is in (or moving toward) PLM, whether PLM 2.0 still remains PLM, whether DS is fruitfully doing digital prototyping, etc. I think yes is a reasonable answer to all these questions.

Another illustration to the problem of notions is given in Paul Hamilton’s post 2009 - The Year of … Confusion?. This seems even more interesting and more associated with example of science – although of course not so exciting for the mass market.

Paul explains that while introducing Synchronous and Fusion technologies Siemens and Autodesk confused the market by groundless playing with terms of parametric and history-free modeling, direct and parametric workflows, digital model, and others. You may oppose to this by saying why should Siemens care about different terminology system – especially when it comes from a competitor? Nevertheless, I prefer Paul Hamilton’s position: he has proposed a detailed, reasonable and so far unique classification of important hot notions, which is likely useful for the CAD industry in general and it is not harmful for any particular producer of new modeling technologies…

So my opinion is that basic notions and terminology should at least be always respected, referenced, mentioned… which absolutely does not contradict to discussions and critics.
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