Russia invests 690 000 000 rubles into building a national 3D solid modeling kernel

Last week, a Russian daily Izvestia published an article which announced the completion of the tender whose topic was “Building of a national 3D solid modeling kernel”. The winner is a well-known MOSCOW STATE TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY "STANKIN", one of the leading technical universities in Russia and likely in Europe. (STANKIN is an abbreviation for machine-tool institute). The main comment for Izvestia was given by Sergey Kuraksin, presented by the daily as the CEO of the engineering center of STANKIN. The CAD market perfectly knows Sergey mainly as the CEO of Top Systems, one of the leading Russian CAD/PLM companies whose offerings include 3D CAD TFlex and a developed PLM set of products. 

Another participant of the tender was TsAGI, The Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute named after N.Zhukovsky. TsAGI is world known by fundamental contributions into the Soviet and Russian aviation and space industry.

Of course the tender was open; all its minor details (see a link below) seem to confirm that although TsAGI is obviously a unique engineering institution, its skills and experience in software engineering look substantially less than those of STANKIN (especially together with Top Systems).  

The investment into the project is 690M RUR (today ~22M USD) for 3 years. Parasolid is indicated “as a functional prototype” for the project.

Izvestia gives a brief characteristics of what the modeling kernel is, mentions the component's key importance for industry, and says that today the world and Russian industry use such imported products as Parasolid and other – produced more than 20 years ago. (Note that ASCON, a leading Russian CAD/PLM provider, has its in-house modeling kernel which is so far used only for the company's products such as well-known KOMPAS 3D). 

The article also quotes some external expert opinions that are generally skeptical. One of them says that building a software is not a key point and reminds that Siemens has a very large team to maintain Parasolid. The same expert is surprised how TsAGI which has a great “experience in plane design could fail in tender with STANKIN”. Another person, a manager from SolidWorks Russia, explains that end-users do not care what modeling kernels are used in applications and added that “his company is not going to replace Parasolid with something else”.

Links:

An article in Izvestia 

All details of the tender 

STANKIN full web site in Russian , Some words about STANKIN in English 1, --- in English 2 

TopSystems , full Web site in Russian  

TsAGI 

T-FLEXCAD 12 and KOMPAS-3D V13 confirm high activity of the Russian MCAD market 

Direct Modeling and other Top 10 topics of CAD/PLM at isicad.net

isicad.net is a modest English version of the most popular Russian CAD/PLM web resource isicad.ru published by LedasGroup. In contrast to the Russian version which aims to cover all key news and trends of the world and Russian markets of engineering software, isicad.net briefly reflects what happens at the Russian and CIS markets and from time to time publishes English translations of some original Russian articles related to the CAD/PLM domain.

Below you can see a list of Top 10 most visited articles. 

1. How to Express Design Intent in Rhino 3D :11.2009 

2. “The Future of MCAD” Roundtable Organized by isicad and upFront.eZine :09.2009         
3.The prodigal son of Autodesk :05.2009 
4. New Armor for Rhino :07.2011 
5. A brief interview with Steffen Buchwald (Siemens PLM Software) :06.2009 
6. Synchronous Technology: The Third Attempt :10.2010 
7.CIMdata evaluates PLM-market in 2010 and gives optimistic forecasts :04.2011 
8.Variational Direct Modeling: How to Keep Design Intent in History-Free CAD :10.2008 
9.The Future of MCAD: Round Table in Moscow :07.2009 
10. Bricscad Enters 3D Solid Modeling for Mechanical Design Market :01.2011  

Note that some of listed items are comparatively new and still have chances to move to the higher positions. By the way, an article “Direct Modeling -Who and Why Needs It? A Review of Competitive Technologies — by Dmitry Ushakov” published just couple days ago, judging by Google Analytics, can move to the very top of the list.    

The isicad.net Overview of the Russian CAD/PLM Market, May-October 2011

Here are some key topics of the overview:

- After 5 years of successful work for Autodesk CIS, Alex Tasev becomes head of PTC CIS and reports outstanding results of PTC at CIS market

- Dassault Systemes and Siemens PLM extend their Russian offices and demonstrate good spirit

- SolidWorks is still inarticulate in Russia in spite of very much respect to its software

- Top Systems emphasises its extended PLM orientation and integrates with Autodesk Inventor

Marketing and Internet in Russia

- Autodesk CIS Forum held on 21-22 of September was the most striking event of the year

- ASCON is probably the most dynamic company at the Russian CAD/PLM market

- LEDAS extended the range of its business interests and genres

- Bentley Systems becomes much more visible at the Russian market

- NanoCAD 3.0 2011 ~ AutoCAD LT 2009

The full overview is here .  The cover page of N25 (see below) has been inspired by a well-known fair-tale and an article “How Direct Modeling Transforms Cinderella into the Princess” (see a link in the overview). Please click the picture to enlarge and see a flash animated version (i.e. not for i-devices).

Providing geometric solvers (be it Siemens PLM or LEDAS) is cool but became not so profitable

23 years after D-Cubed has released the first ever commercial geometric constraint solver (2D DCM), its current owner Siemens PLM Software published, practically for the first time, more or less full statistics on this part of its business (see a link below).

D-Cubed is a company founded by an outstanding mathematician John Owen. It seems natural that this happened  in Cambridge - one of the recognized world centers of math foundations for CAD: note that ACIS and Parasolid have their roots also at Cambridge, and D-Cubed was initially somewhat invested by Spatial. In 2004 D-Cubed was acquired by UGS, and in 2007 – already as a part of UGS – sank into the great arms of Siemens PLM.

A key point of the above mentioned statistics is 200 - a total number of licenses sold since 1988. It includes five different and important technological components: 2D DCM, 3D DCM, PGM, and other. 99 from that 200 are the 2D DCM solvers.

LGS 2D and 3D from LEDAS appeared in the market in 2004, fifteen years after DCM. In total, during 7 years, LEDAS sold 30 licenses of its LGS. My main conclusion is that independently on any classification approach, such comparison of LGS with a child of John Owen and with a great Siemens is honorable for LEDAS:). 

Some of those who sell or resell products by millions copies would probably be laughing at 30 and 200. Yes, you may laugh but note that these 200 and 30 are the programs that to be designed and developed need extreme math qualification, hundreds of man-years to make them industrial, and they are sold not to end-users but mainly to sufficiently serious CAD/CAE/CAM vendors… BTW, the post with D-Cubed statistics mentions very many (millions) user seats for their 200 copies, it’s not clear how many of them are actually survived but historically it’s doubtless impressive: it’s enough to note that until recently these millions included millions of SolidWorks seats. Well anyway, I want to quote a nice sentence from the post about the milestone statistics of D-Cubed “Not bad for a range of products that many end-users will never have heard of”.     

    

One may reasonably ask: in the long run, income is much more important indicator than number of licenses. Maybe. And in some cases – definitely yes. I have no right to open some numbers but try to imagine how much Dassault Systemes, fifteen years ago, was paying to D-Cubed and then to UGS… Here is the key point: compared with 90^th when (1) D-Cubed was a monopolist and (2) big customers-vendors had no their own components such as geometric solvers,  today this has drastically changed, in the first place – in prices. Without opening some confidential data, I can just say that LEDAS has substantially contributed to this changes – both in (1) and (2). (Who knows, if around 2002, D-Cubed and LEDAS combined their efforts, they both could earn more:).       

What is my conclusion? Those who are able to develop an industrial technologic component of a DCM/LGS type are very probably smart guys. And yes, a vendor of such components justly gets some good additional points to the market rating of its company. Also, if such a vendor itself intensively applies its own technological components in its own mass products, this may become an important competitive advantage. My opinion is that distribution of such components today can hardly be a proportionally serious part of a successful business. However, in the long run, much depends on the sales skills.

On the other hand, those who succeeded in development of advanced components can likely be efficient providers of program development services – be they related to the maintenance for such components or to the development of whatever advanced programs in engineering software or beyond. But this is another story…  

Thanks to Ralph Grabowski, you can take a look at two much explaining publication:

AllAbout D-Cubed's 2D DCM and

LEDAS Responds to D-Cubed.

And of course look at “Major Milestones for the D-Cubed Components” which deservedly celebrates the above-mentioned 200-milestone and actually motivated me for this blog post. My respect and congratulations to D-Cubed!

CAD/PLM in June: How I Saw It From Russia Or Within the Country. Part I: Top Systems and Siemens PLM

You may consider this post as a June part of an overview which almost quarterly I try to compose at isicad.net (see for example this). On the other hand, this post is to some extent an overview of my Russian posts of June. This combination has a contradiction since in the English isicad.net overviews I aim to present some key issues of the Russian market while my Russian blog of course includes some comments on events of the global market. Besides, my Russian posts usually include a lot of Russian cultural context which I am absolutely not able to transform into English…

1. At the beginning of June, Top Systems, the second (after ASCON) Russian CAD/PLM company known first of all by its powerful Parasolid-based  MCAD T-FLEX, held its big annual conference. At the conference the company announced “PLM+” characterized as follows:  «Its fundamental distinction from traditional PLM solutions is an essential extension of integrated software environment which now covers not only tasks of life-cycle but all its accompanying processes».  (For the first time this PLM+ was briefly mentioned by Top System CEO Sergei Kuraksin at COFES-Russia-2010 seminar in Moscow). In one of my June posts  I asked Sergei “What traditional PLM solutions he means, maybe those of DS, Siemens, PTC, ARAS or even Autodesk? What are the tasks not covered by traditional PLM that are solved by PLM+? Are there any tasks solved by traditional PLM and not solved by PLM+ based on T-FLEX?...”  

My conclusion was that although Top Systems do not follow modern trends of mobility, social networking, SaaS, and other, the company can probably succeed with some big Russian enterprises, say from defense domain, that are traditionally more conservative. (Note, that Top Systems has quite a good customer base since the company basic solutions are actually effective, however until recent time, marketing of Top Systems was rather rudimentary). Finally, I wrote that such gigantomania may be a result of some inferiority complex, and, building PLM+ may help in its satisfaction:). Later, in the comment section of my post, we had with Sergei a nice discussion, and soon Top Systems has published an article which made their PLM+ concept more clear, it looks like that PLM+ is PLM+ERP (you can conclude this from the TLAs seen at the picture below).

My above mentioned post has a title “Prompt Psycho(analysis) of Some Recent CAD Publications”. Along with Top Systems, I touched there Siemens PLM and PTC. 

2. With an objective to give Russian readers my impression about «Global Launch Solid Edge ST4» I retold and commented couple posts of Roopinder Tara. I am not going to retell them for you. One small terminology nuance attracted my attention: Tony Affuso speaks not about necessity to work more with SME but with midstream enterprises. Is small not a word from Siemens PLM lexicon? At least subconsciously?  

My own opinion about Solid Edge and its future:

- ST is a successful pioneer of Direct Modeling which will inevitably win the future of MCAD (we at LEDAS are confident about this not only from publications but from our own projects),

-Solid Edge is definitely a very good system (it’s a pity that Siemens never agreed to give LEDAS trial versions or so: was this because of the  competition between D-Cubed and LGS),

- I estimate the probability for Solid Edge  to rise from its current (3rd?) to 1st or 2dn place (today kept by SW and Inventor) or even to approach them as much as 5% - practically independent of SPLM marketing efforts,

- However  we can rather probably soon hear about something like hundreds if not thousand installations of Solid Edge to one or other “Daimler-Benz”:),  

- 5% of positive probability I give to the scenarios such as «DS actually kills SW» or/and  «Autodesk makes something crazy with Inventor »:).

BTW, I am pleased to mention a remarkable and very large interview with Chuck Grindstaff, President and CTO of Siemens PLM Software taken by Alexandra Sukhanova, executive editor of the Russian language magazine “CAD/CAM/CAE Observer” published in Riga, Latvia.

Just look at the great gallery of interviews taken by Alexandra during last several years). It would be strange to retell here the interview with Chuck called “The revolution in CAD/PLM should not lead to discontinuity of innovation process”), I can only mention that he perfectly combines his CTO role (characteristics of SPLM solutions) and that of the President (characteristics of competitors and comparison of SPM with them). It looks like he is strict and biased to DS (main and dangerous competitor?), demonstrates  indulgence to PTC (not main competitor?), and does not take seriously Autodesk (not a competitor at all in SPLM key business?)… Alexandra kindly permitted me to re-publish this interview at isicad.ru, and I hope we will see an interesting discussion.  

See Part II: PTC, ASCON and Autodesk

An overview of automakers’ PLM systems: Siemens PLM Connection and Russian TV

Yesterday automotiveIT.com published an overview of automakers’ PLM systems. It's interesting to compare a table and comments from this article:

with a slide recently demonstrated at Siemens PLM Connection 2011 as likely a proof of a full victory in a PLM-race in automobile industry:

.

isicad.ru in its news (in Russian) complements the automotiveIT overview by the following comment.   

    "We calculated the number of references of products from every PLM-vendor:
- Siemens PLM (NX, Teamcenter, Tecnomatix): 34 systems at 15 automobile companies
- Dassault Systemes (Catia, Enovia, Delmia): 21 --- at 12 
- PTC (Creo, Windchill): 7 --- at 5.

    Siemens PLM is actually the leader however Siemens PLM and Dassault Systemes have comparable number of customers. Moreover if we consider CAD domain, CATIA has 10 customers against 8 of NX and 5 of Creo. The slide from Siemens PLM Connections is of course not lies but its relation to the reality and selectivity can be compared with a news from today's Russian state TV".

I do not believe and do not insist that such technology of seleciton and presentation is a unique invention of Siemens or Russian TV:) 

Space and CAD in Russia: 50 Years since Gagarin’s Flight

On 12 April is the 50th jubilee of the first man flight to the space. Rocket and space technology has always been on the cutting edge of technological progress; however, back in 1961 developers of “Vostok” could not use CAD because such tools simply did not exist – the first CAD prototype, as we understand it now, appeared only in 1963. Russian Principal Designer Sergey Korolyov, and his colleagues used traditional engineering tools for that period – a drawing board and a slide rule.

The article published at isicad.ru with a support of the PTC office in Moscow outlines modern situation in the Russian space industry. In particular the overview is based on the story presented by Alexander Philatov, the Head of the IT Department of “Progress” Samara Space Centre - the company that for over fifty years has been producing legendary launch-rockets, originating from R-7: “Vostok”, “Voskhod”, “Molnia”, “Soyuz” - that Russian cosmonauts used to fly and that delivered automatic stations to the Moon and other planets. Today at “Progress” everything works on the basis of 3D models – from master-geometry to specific mock-up workpieces. “Progress” uses a lot of CAD and PLM tools from various vendors and the paper gives some impression how all this software co-exists in Samara.

The paper describes in much details the CAD-PLM environment at "Progress" which along with PTC soluitons includes those from ASCON, Autodesk, DS SolidWorks, and Siemens PLM Software. It also mentiones how "Progress" successfully communicates with Samara State Aerospace University.

See a full paper “Space & CAD in Russia: 50 Years since Gagarin’s Flight”. 

Russian CAD/PLM Market: May-Oct, 2010

If you don't receive by e-mail my quaterly overviews of the Russian CAD/PLM market, you can take a look at a web variant of the today's report at isicad.net. Below I put an introduction for this paper.

Basically, we use news, press-releases, and papers published earlier at isicad.net. However few actors of the Russian market produce English publications about their local activity in Russia. In important cases, we try to retell their Russian news just in our own words. Since autumn of 2009, we’ve got a great support from bloggers and journalists who write in English and visit(ed) Russia: this started from a remarkable series of Ralph Grabowski and then was continued by Deelip Menezes, Oleg Shilovitsky, and hopefully, Martyn Day.

isicad.ru has no data from vendors about current volumes of their sales but general situation at the Russian CAD/PLM market is characterized by:
- nobody mentions crisis,
- everybody publishes news about new contracts and organizes big conferences and seminars everywhere in Russia.

My own formulations of companies' news in few words are as follows:
- 1C with its huge small-ERP reselling network and together with APPIUS is getting closer and closer to PLM,
- ASCON strongly emphasizes its SaaS / cloud service but does not forget improving its MCAD,
- Autodesk CIS is more and more improving communication with mass Russian market,
- Dassault Systemes promotes its social networking and continues working with big industries,
- LEDAS reconfigures its business and persistently moves towards implementation of direct modeling and its applications,
- Nanosoft continues promotion of its native free platforms but balances this by more reselling of Western products,
- PTC is enhancing its (already strong) distribution network,
- Siemens PLM promotes its ST3 and continues working with big industries.
- Top Systems announced that they have a full-scale world-class PLM.

See the whole paper with a dozens links here.

LEDAS Responds to D-Cubed / Siemens PLM Software

For obvious reasons, I reproduce a guest editorial (by Dmitry Ushakov, director of product management at LEDAS, Novosibirsk Russia) just published by Ralph Grabowski in his u p F r o n t . e Z i n e, Issue #646. The only additional remark is that the technologies in question will be openly and in details discussed within one of the working groups in September at COFES-Russia seminar in Moscow.

"All About D-Cubed's 2D DCM" (in #645) was especially interesting, since the name of the company I work for (LEDAS) was mentioned. In answering upFront.eZine's question about competitors, D-Cubed's Dr Howarth said that "For the DCM geometric constraint solving components, LEDAS, based in Russia, is a relatively recent entrant". May I make a correction?

LEDAS Ltd. was established eleven years ago -- in 1999. Seven years ago, we began selling our technology component LGS 2D, a direct competitor of D-Cubed's 2D DCM. Our component is designed to support parametric sketching/drawing in 2D/3D CAD/CAM/CAE applications. Since then, a dozen software companies have licensed LGS 2D, as well as our 3D version, LGS 3D (our component that is a competitor of D-Cube's 3D DCM), and embedded them successfully into their applications. So, while we are ten years younger than D-Cubed, we are not new.

From our point of view, the primary difference between us is that D-Cubed is a part of a big vendor, Siemens PLM Systems; we are independent. Siemens PLM Systems competes in the CAD/CAM applications market against other companies who license D-Cubed's components. Do these companies receive the same level of technical support and functionality as do divisions inside Siemens? For example, are any competitors able to license Siemens' synchronous technology? This is not a question that our customers need to ask, for all of our technologies are completely available to them, because we do not compete with our customers.

We are aware of Dr. Owen (founder of D-Cubed) and his remarkable contribution to the field of geometric constraint solving. At the same time, it is worthwhile mentioning the contributions of other researchers. Among them are Prof. Hoffmann from Purdue University (USA), Prof. Michelucci from Université de Bourgogne (France), and Prof. Clement from Dassault Systemes (France), as well as other pioneer researchers whose work on solving geometric constraints go as far back as 1975.

Constraints Solved to the Users' Satisfaction
Whereas algorithmic issues have been elaborated enough during the last thirty years, there are just a few commercial geometric constraint solvers on the market. In my opinion, it is not enough to only solve the constraint satisfaction problem. What is also needed is a way to find a solution that best corresponds to the expectations of end-users -- this is called natural behavior, and sometimes depends on the subjective opinions of users. The maturity of a particular commercial technology for constraint solving is based on continuous improvement in the quality of its solving procedure. This process is driven by requests from customers who use the solver in different contexts.

LEDAS also does research in constraint solving. It seems that our team is somewhat similar in its scientific and technical background to the one Dr Howarth works with; in particular, about half of our developers have their Ph.D.s and many others have a good chance to receiving it. This brain power is necessary, because the development of CAD components combines strong mathematical, computer science, and software engineering know-how. We actively collaborate with universities, such as the ongoing research at Purdue University (USA) in the field of CAD user interfaces. Together, we are improving constraint-driven freehand sketching, which is the key to building robust sketch-aware systems and sketch-based interfaces for future CAD systems.

Some customers who license our technology are not only traditional CAD vendors (Tecnos G.A. and CD-adapco), but also firms who embed our LGS 3D component into custom CAD systems. Joe Gibbs Racing of NASCAR, for example, is using our software to assemble suspension parts onto the chassis. Other customers prefer to exploit our mathematically-skilled team to develop proprietary key components, such as for CATIA V5, which has been on the market now for several years.

Last year, we collaborated with Open Design Alliance, a non-profit consortium of over 2,000 software developers, to integrate our LGS 2D geometric constraint solver into their Teigha platform, and is fully compatible with the DWG 2010 file format. Now our solver is available to ODA members who require constraint support for their applications.

Constraint Technology for the Future
One of Dr. Howarth's interesting points is regarding the future direction for geometric constraint solvers. We share his vision of increasing the use of 3D solvers as the engine for a new generation of direct modelers. For us, this is an important field of research. As direct modelers become more popular, the question becomes how to keep design intent in a history-free environment. To answer the question, LEDAS is now developing our "variational direct modeling" (VDM) technology.

(VDM allows users to intelligently modify any parameter in a direct modeling system, while design intent is automatically recognized by our engine and expressed as a set of geometric and engineering constraints. We have developed a plug-in for McNeel & Associates' Rhinoceros direct modeling software, which allows anyone to evaluate our VDM technology.)

I trust that this addition to the Dr. Howarth interview is useful for readers of upFront.eZine, and I am available to answer further questions at ushakov@ledas.com."

[Dmitry Ushakov is director of product management at LEDAS, Novosibirsk Russia.]
http://www.ledas.com/

Brief isicad-Overview of the Russian CAD/PLM Market: Jan-Apr, 2010

This is a brief overview of the news from Russian CAD/PLM market in January-April just published at
http://www.isicad.net/. A general impression is that the recession is over; at least actors of the Russian market stopped complaining and became active and hopefully productive.

I. Some topics considered traditional, or hot, or isicad-related

Aviation:
· Russian RRJ project became materialized and today everyone is aware or at least has heard from the media that such project was impossible without CAD/PLM
· Launch of the Russian Raptor-like 5G Fighter is one of the most impressive news of the reported months
· In April there was a big Russian conference called “PLM for aeronautical engineering: development, design, manufacturing”, see an announce (in Russian).

My conclusion: in contrast to 2006 or even to 2008, PLM in Russia is no longer exotic or considered skeptically.

Оpen source solutions:
· Increasing interest in Russia to open source solutions
· Russian Parliament Promotes Domestic Linux.

Clouds: As everywhere, people in Russia are very excited about clouds. Google gives you a lot of conferences and seminars on this topic. One example is a conference organized in Moscow by HP “Cloud computations: education, research, software development”. See also my English blog post Clouds in Russia.

COFES Russia Seminar: The seminar together with isicad-2010 Forum will be held on 21 September 2010 in Moscow (http://cofes.com/Russia , http://isicad.ru/2010). Brad Holtz, President of Cyon Research and COFES, will be the keynote speaker. Among other participants well-known experts and bloggers Deelip Menezes and Oleg Shilovitsky. See the press release Cyon Research announces COFES Russia Seminar in partnership with LEDAS and my blog-posts:
· COFES-Russia Seminar and Multi-vendor Forum isicad-2010 in Moscow
· HP and PTC support COFES-Russia Seminar in September 2010.

www.isicad.ru has definitely become a leading Russian CAD/PLM portal. Frankly, if we mean actually CAD/PLM then it’s the only professional portal with its own strict selection of publications. Along with everyday news and press-releases, the portal publishes more and more analytical articles and reports. PLMpedia is a unique collection of articles related to CAD/PLM and presenting information on companies, products and solutions, media, persons, etc. Today, this electronic encyclopedia contains about 1200 very carefully selected articles. Traffic of both web sites is steadily growing, now being around 1000 attendees per day.

II. Some news from CAD/PLM vendors at the Russian market

ARAS: now – in Russia RUPLM company (with unidentified location but a sounding name!) presented to the Russian market a Russian version of ARAS Innovator.

AVEVA: its Russian business thrives AVEVA Group, a well known provider of engineering lifecycle solutions to the plant, power and marine industries, reports that sales of its AVEVA NET Information Management solution have surged in Russia. The company gives some names of big Russian enterprises that have recently become AVEVA customers.

ASCON, the Largest Russian CAD/PLM Company, presented its 2009 results and plans for 2010. In 2009 the company attracted 650 new customers, while the overall number of the companies using ASCON solutions exceeded 5400. Sales reached 544.2 million Rubles (approx. $18 million); in comparison with 2008 the level of revenue decreased by 28%. On the whole, the company closed 2009 with operating profit and positive net profit margin. More details (in English) about ASCON report can be found in my blog.

As for reports in Russian, isicad.ru published detailed illustrated interviews with ASCON top managers: V.Zakharov, director of software development, and D.Osnatch, marketing director.

See also some latest company news: Parametrisation in KOMPAS-3D and Professional 3D CAD Trainings, 3days (24 hour) for FREE only for German users!

Autodesk changed the head of its Russian office. As everywhere globally, the key Autodesk action during the reported period was a release of its 2011 series. Autodesk Russia office kindly and timely provided isicad.ru with all necessary materials so that we could promptly publish overviews for Russian readers: on AutoCAD, Inventor, and Revit. The first paper was reflected in my blog post: AutoCAD 2011: Marching to the Masses with 3D and a Pleasant Make-up.

Among other Autodesk-Russia news note that Ministry of the Russian Federation for Civil Defense, Emergencies and Disaster Relief has chosen Autodesk 3ds Max for building a full data base of 3D Geo models for Russian cartography, see my blog post.

A big Ukrainian gas company “UzhNIIGiproGas” has recently purchased 200 licenses of AutoCAD MEP after it decided to use the Autodesk solution instead of «Bentley PowerDraft».

Dassault Systemes and JSC AVTOVAZ officially confirmed successful implementation of DS CATIA software for designing new car models. AVTOVAZ, best known to the world for its LADA brand, is the leading car manufacturer in Russia. More than a quarter of the cars sold in Russia are manufactured by AVTOVAZ. Every year the company enriches its product line with new car models or modifications as well as with multiple new configurations of the existing ones. Despite the economic crisis, AVTOVAZ intends to continue renewing its product line.

(Note that in February 2008, AvtoVAZ and Renault signed a strategic partnership. The aim was to accelerate the growth of AvtoVAZ, to renew and expand its vehicle range, to develop the Lada brand in order to consolidate its leading position on the Russian market and finally to create value for the Renault group. According to “Auto-rumours” website, Avtovaz and Renault plan to produce five new joint models based on Logan; the web site reports that the management will be done by Nissan).

IRONCAD officially came to Russia. After 13-year existence of its 3D modeling system IronCAD LLC announced that “3D Industry group” would from now on be the first official IRONCAD reseller in Russia. The Russian website of 3D Industry group does not provide any information on the status and location of this reseller.

LEDAS announced RhinoDirect, a new plug-in that parametrically edits history-free 3D geometry in Rhinoceros, implemented (together with Open Design Alliance) parametric drawing tools compatible with the DWG 2010 file format, shipped LGS 3D v3 to take a major step towards full-scale variational direct modeling – technology that creates design intent by combining the simplicity of history-free geometric editing with the power of constraints, and added movie recording and localization to RhinoAssembly, the ultimate tool for assembly design and kinematic simulation of mechanisms downloaded by more than 5,000 Rhinoceros users worldwide.

Initially Nanosoft became sensationally known by its policy formulated as “Native Russian CAD-for-free instead of expensive CAD from abroad” (see for example Ralph Grabowski’s notes on his meeting with Nanosoft). This business direction is still pursued in a somewhat more realistic way but at the same time Nanosoft has step by step extended its policy based on patriotic slogans by becoming a distributor of ArchiCAD (a virtual building solution from Graphisoft) and Altium (CAD-for-radio electronics).

PTC also as Autodesk changed the head of their Russian office and during a couple weeks in April organized PTC Innovation Forum’10 in four big Russian cities: Moscow, St-Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, and Novosibirsk. PTC and its Russian business partners (Solver, Pro/Technologies, PTS, and IRISOFT) presented updates of PTC key products, explained company business approaches, and demonstrated successful applications including those in the space industry. The isicad photo galleries give impressions about forums in Moscow and Novosibirsk. It seems that PTC has a good potential to increase considerably its share on the Russian market: of course, the company has objectively interesting solutions but I believe that one of the factors is that after several years of relative silence today PTC is considered in Russia as somewhat fresh:).

SAP: Gazprom decided to pay SAP 80 000 000 Euros for its software. It’s not very clear to what extent the software is PLM related but Gazprom’s name and the amount of money make the deal worth mentioning.

Siemens PLM Software organized in late March its traditional Moscow Forum “Siemens PLM Connection 2010”. According to its organizers “the event was very successful, however, since it was intended especially for customers, no press-reports should not be expected”.

.

LEDAS Reproduces AutoCAD 2010 Parametric Drawing with ODA and Moves towards Variational Direct Modelling with Rhino

1. In June 2009, the Open Design Alliance (ODA) and LEDAS announced their cooperation to develop constraint support for the DWG 2010 format in DWGdirect™. In that announcement, ODA President, Arnold van der Weide, commented, “… We are excited to give our members the opportunity to integrate DWGdirect and LGS 2D (one of the LEDAS Geometric Solvers) together with minimal member development effort, and we are convinced that this work will benefit existing as well as potential ODA members.”

Now, in March 2010, ODA and LEDAS announced that the intended constraint support for the DWG 2010 has been implemented on the basis of the latest version 3.0 of the LEDAS LGS 2D. Dmitry Ushakov, Director of Product Management of LEDAS will present this result at the second ODA World Conference in Orlando (USA) , May 4-5. By this integration, ODA and LEDAS enable 2000+ companies (members of the Alliance) worldwide to implement parametric drawing functions in their DWG-compatible applications.

The ODA – LEDAS cooperation was initiated just after the first ODA World Conference in Leiden, Holland last year, where Dmitry Ushakov gave a talk entitled “Using LGS Geometric Solver to Create a DRX-module that Supports Geometric and Dimensional Constraints”, which caused significant interest of the conference attendees. This interest was heated by release of – just one month before the conference – AutoCAD 2010, a new generation of popular CAD software that finally supported parametric drawing functions (widely available before in almost all many MCAD software packages). LEDAS presented a module that implements similar functions on top of LGS 2D, a geometric constraint solver developed by LEDAS since 2004 and embedded in several industrial CAD packages. (See Dmitry’s detailed report on the first ODA World Conference).

At the second conference in Orlando Dmitry Ushakov will also present a free demo application that everyone can use to evaluate these parametric design tools. The application allows users to open and visualize parametric drawing files created in AutoCAD 2010, to edit their dimensional and geometric constraints (they are solved immediately after editing), and to save the files in DWG 2010 format enabling further editing these files in AutoCAD 2010. The attendees of the dedicated ODA Technology Exchange workshop will learn how they can embed the parametric drawing technology into their applications for different platforms.

2. In Orlando, Dmitry Ushakov will additionally present the current state of the LEDAS project related to variational direct modeling technology (VDM), which allows CAD users to edit solid models parametrically in history-free environment where design intent is expressed by explicit and implicit geometric constraints and driving dimensions.

VDM goes far beyond traditional direct modeling approach: this technology allows parametric modification of 3D geometric shapes in history-free environment that preserves design intent expressed with explicit and implicit geometric constraints. LEDAS considers VDM as a technology ideologically similar (but different from a technical point of view) to what is being implemented in Siemens PLM Software as synchronous technology. In contrast to synchronous technology (and similar things from other Big Vendors like Autodesk Inventor Fusion and PTC CoCreate), VDM is proposed for licensing to CAD developers. Based on company's resources and objectives, LEDAS is implementing its project in stages, each of which results in releasing an application – a plug-in for a popular market product. Every subsequent plug-in (or its version) accumulates a new portion of the technology, improves (CAD-independent) architecture, attracts potential customers of the LEDAS direct modeling, implements a market-demanded parametrization for the systems that lack this functionality, and of course brings LEDAS an increasing income.

The first plug-in (made for Google SketchUp which enabled LEDAS to implement and debug an initial architecture and a comparatively simple functionality) has been by today downloaded about 20 000 times.

A more serious system was in 2009 implemented for Rhinoceros, see LEDAS Adds Assemblies and Kinematics to Rhino (LEDAS moves McNeel & Associates’ Rhinoceros NURBS modeler closer to the mainstream MCAD with $395 Rhino Assembly 1.0 plug-in for assembling complex mechanisms and simulating kinematics).

http://www.drivingdimensions.com/ is a special LEDAS website devoted to present a series of the above mentioned plug-ins.

A couple of days ago, LEDAS released a new beta version of its RhinoDirect plug-in . Here is a video which demonstrates a full cycle of parametric hammer modeling in Rhinoceros – combining Rhino history with constraints.





3.The two projects mentioned above in this article are fundamentally based on the LEDAS Geometric Solvers, LGS 2D and LGS 3D , -- the market products that quite successfully compete (as you can see from CD-adapco licenses LEDAS variational geometric solver LGS 2D or Joe Gibbs Racing to Use LEDAS LGS 3D Geometric Solver) with D-Cubed componentsfrom Siemens PLM SOftware.

Some (or many) people might be surprised by such ambitious projects and plans of LEDAS, a company with 30 employees. This feeling may vary in the range from admiration to mistrust – especially if one could get information about some big outsourcing LEDAS projects that are naturally closed by strict NDAs. Well, in the Web one can even find some publications related to CAD technologies that compare LEDAS with SiemensJ.

No, LEDAS can in no means be compared with Siemens. But LEDAS can reasonably be compared with D-Cubed. D-Cubed is a remarkable UK company (founded in 1989 by an outstanding expert John Owen), which was first to release industrial geometric solvers and for a long time had the market monopoly. In 2004 D-Cubed was acquired by UGS, and in 2007 became wrapped even deeper when Siemens acquired UGS and transformed it into Siemens LM Software.

LEDAS and D-Cubed seem to have comparable academic history and background. See some information about LEDAS competence and history. LEDAS is operating in a world-famous research and university center, thus having inexhaustible opportunities to spoon out very high quality human resources in math and software development. Since the company foundation, these potential is effectively being implemented: today about a half of the LEDAS R&D staff are PhDs with average age around 28.

Of course LEDAS has no budget-like financing (as it happens inside of Very Big Vendors) but on 1st of April, the company is going to celebrate its 11th anniversary independent, flexible, implementing a number of high-competence-required internal and external projects, opened to multiple business contacts, and full of ideas.
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