AutoCAD 2011: Marching to the Masses with 3D and a Pleasant Make-up

As soon as the magic September 25 came, isicad.ru published (in Russian) a detailed review of the AutoCAD 2011 novelties.

The author of the review, Ilya Tatarnikov (LEDAS), suggests that the 2011, compared with somewhat fundamental advancements of AutoCAD 2010, does not demonstrate any revolutionary steps. However it contains a couple of new important features – as well as a number of new useful details that look like a pleasant make-up.

As one of the key features of AutoCAD 2011, the isicad review characterizes functionality enabling automated generation of constraints while creating geometric objects (inferred constraints). Such facilities considerably accelerate design process and reduce user efforts. “Inferred constraints for sketching” certainly is not a market innovation, it can be found in many parametric systems, e.g. in SolidWorks, NX, Autodesk Inventor, and LEDAS Driving Dimensions for SketchUp.

The review presents a lot of new functions announced in AutoCAD 2011: surface modeling tools, point cloud support, polyline editing improvements, hatch command enhancements, create / select similar objects, hide / isolate objects, and others.

The author grouped several essential 3D-related improvements: along with 3D modeling workspace, the user now has «3D Basic», which provides access to some 3D-instruments with a minimum set of not always necessary buttons, at the same time, «3D Modeling» now includes 5 new predefined styles of visualization, support of 3D-mise (3D-Connection), projection of 2D geometry to 3D-objects, means to analyze (zebra stripes, curvature, draft) surfaces and solids, etc.

The paper states that despite the emergence of several new features of 3D modeling, AutoCAD still lacks parameterization in this area: history tree is not accessible; one cannot specify geometric and dimensional constraints in 3D. In this aspect, we can expect further improvements in version 2012 or the following releases (remember how long it took Autodesk to implement 2D-parametrization in AutoCAD). Without 3D-parameterization, AutoCAD can be compared with SketchUp or Rhino, but not with SolidWorks or even Alibre Design.

In Russian the isicad review is titled «3D marching to the masses with AutoCAD 2011». Well, 3D is definitely important while marching to the masses is sometimes profitable, isn’t it?

Pay attention at What's inside AutoCAD 2011? by Ralph Grabowski.

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ASCON, the Largest Russian CAD/PLM Company: Results of 2009 and Plans for 2010

ASCON is keeping not less than 25% of the Russian CAD market – approximately as Autodesk and considerably more than other world leading CAD companies. At a press-conference in Moscow on 23rd March, ASCON top executives announced figures characterizing company performance in 2009 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. ASCON is committed to the principle of open information policy and is the only player in its segment of the Russian IT-market that discloses financial results. Maxim Bogdanov, ASCON CEO: “2009 was marked by a sharp drop in industrial production in the major regions of ASCON business. Our customers cut down their investments in automation by half. We have been too optimistic in our forecasting, which we based on our experience of surviving the 1998 crisis. Our efforts to improve internal efficiency, centered on clearly defined priorities, enabled the key achievement – maintaining the scope and momentum for developing new program products”.

With regard to industry markets, 70% of sold software products were design and manufacturing solutions for machine- and instrument- building, 30% - design solutions for industrial and civil construction.

The income from project implementing, training and integration increased by 11% and has now exceeded 20% of the total revenue.

In 2009 ASCON focused its efforts on the two sectors: the military-industrial complex and oil and gas. The largest automation projects were implemented for TATNEFT (one of the largest Russian oil companies), KB Mashynostroyenia (a major development and production center specializing in design, manufacture, test and integration of various armament and military equipment), Russian Federal Nuclear Center, State Research and Production Space-Rocket Center "TsSKB-Progress", Bashneft (Oil of Bashkiria). ASCON entered into an Agreement with the Federal Space Agency for expanding the use of ASCON software by the companies of Russian rocket and space complex.

Overall, in 2009 АSCON increased its revenue from the projects in the military-industrial complex by 9% and in the oil and gas sector– by 14%.

2010: Plans and Events
In 2010 positive economic trends will remain volatile; there is a risk of stagnation of domestic industry. Sales are planned at 2009 level.

The schedule for releasing new versions of ASCON flagship solutions:
May – KOMPAS-3D V12, 3D CAD
July – KOMPAS-SPDS V12, design system for AEC
September – ASCON 2010 integrated solutions for manufacturing and AEC
October – KOMPAS-3D V12 for international market.

The company will focus on implementing the already started and launching new end-to-end automation projects in oil and gas, petrochemicals, defense and nuclear industries. ASCON investment program comprises balanced development of the company’s product line, development of new generation solutions and further advancement on foreign markets. ASCON strategy is to consolidate advantages of a software developer and an integrator. Today the company’s portfolio includes: a professional product line, a powerful team of developers, end-to-end industry IT-solutions, and extended infrastructure for training, maintenance and technical support.

ASCON: key figures - 2009:
Sales - 544.2 million Rubles
Customer base - over 5400 companies
Sales pattern: software (78%) and services (22%)
70% software sold - design and manufacturing solutions for machine- and instrument- building
30% software sold - design solutions for industrial and civil construction.
Regional markets: Russia (89%), Ukraine (4%) and Kazakhstan (3%)
Share of partner network in corporate income - 28%.

See also Ralph Grabowski ‘s detailed article about ASCON.
ASCON Web site in English: www.ascon.net
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Russian Parliament Promotes Domestic Linux

According to rbcdaily, the speaker of the Russian State Duma Boris Gryzlov actively supported the idea of creating a Russian operating system based on the open source software. Its development would require up to 5 billion rubles (about 170 million USD).... The idea was initiated in 2009 by a Russian software company ALT Linux and submitted to Mr. Gryzlov at one of the exhibitions on innovation.

Motivation for this project is reported as: "development and implementation of the national programming environment will release considerable resources so far invested in purchasing foreign licenses, and channel this money to the development of domestic software”.

Source: http://www.rbcdaily.ru/2010/03/15/media/464380 .
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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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Join Deelip Menezes to attend COFES-Russia and isicad-2010 in Moscow

Deelip's yesterday post in his blog helps me to announce his participation in CAD/PLM events to be held in Moscow, September 14.

First, I reproduce Deelip' s post:

This September I will be attending isicad 2010 (English translation) and the COFES-Russia Seminar to be held in Moscow. isicad is a bi-annual Russian CAD/PLM conference organized by Ledas and this time Cyon Research is holding a one day COFES seminar as part of the conference. I have never been to Russia before and I intend to visit a few Russian CAD software companies while I am there.
Ledas CEO David Levin is being kind enough to help me organize my trip. A few days ago he announced my participation in isicad 2010 on his Russian blog (Google’s English translation is here). Actually I like the Google Russian translation. According to David and then according to Google I am allegedly the “most popular and prolific English-language blogger, but not less prolific producer of plug-ins to most known CAD“.
Love it. Not sure if that was what David actually wrote, but I think I will take Google’s word for it.
How do you say “Get me some vodka” in Russian?

(For justice' sake, since I don't know statistics, I named Deelip as "one of the most popular bloggers".)

I am really happy that this year, after a very effective Russian tour of Ralph Grabowski in September 2009, Brad Holtz and Deelip Menezes will actively participate in the Moscow events. I invite other international CAD/PLM actors to attend COFES-Russia and isicad-2010. There is no need to explain what is a COFES-related event. As for the isicad multi-vendor forums, you can take a look at the English web sites of the isicad-2004, isicad-2006, and isicad-2008.

I am sure a potential of mutually fruitful business and technology communication between Russia and the world in high-tech and particular in IT is very far from saturation.

One important point is that we must know each other much better. A very small example is vodka: judging by several Deelip's notes, he is obviously not aware about real role of vodka in Russia:). Vodka is not so popular in IT as he imagines and vodka is not so dangerous when properly used: we shall explain him:)...

At last about Google translating. Yes, it's quite useful. If you don't care when "Roopinder Tara" is translated into "Rupinder Packaging":).

John Donahoe, CEO of eBay, joined Twitter in Siberia

The story is about a visit (19 – 23 Feb) of an IT-related delegation the USA to Moscow and Novosibirsk.

The delegation headed by Jared Cohen of Hillary Clinton’s policy-planning staff included John Donahoe, president and CEO of eBay; Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter; Esther Dyson, currently of EDventure; Shervin Pishevar, founder of Social Gaming Network; Padmasree Warrior, CTO of Cisco Systems and some others. Well, among the others there was Ashton Kutcher (!). In Moscow, the delegation has had contacts at the level of the Russian President Administration and IT-related ministries. In Novosibirsk (mostly in Academgorodok – a research and techno campus) they visited some high-tech companies and an emerging Techno-park, and met technology experts, students, and administrations.

Couple of reasons inspired me to write about this visit:
- My software development company LEDAS (basic CAD technologies) and CAD/PLM web portal isicad are operating in the above mentioned Academgorodok, you can read about this for example in Ralph Grabowski’s book; (unfortunately I could not accept an invitation to the yesterday Round Table of the USA delegation with Novosibirsk IT experts but I’ve got a lot of internal notifications and infos),
- I met Esther Dyson in late Soviet times when she was already very active in contacting with Soviet programmers; in 1990, the first thing I saw in her NY office was a bottle of Russian brandy – although (likely forever) unopened,
- There is a hypothetical specific relationship between this delegation and a recent scandal in the Russian CAD market (see my special post AutoCAD for $50: Scandalous Suspension of torrents.ru),
- The Russian media closely connects the visit with the current Russian innovation wave.

While scanning some USA and Russian publications, I tried to formulate my own feeling about what is all this about.

From the USA part, it looks more or less clear from at least:
- An official quote saying that the visit is a “… part of a State Department-sponsored initiative to share U.S. expertise on such daunting problems as corruption and human trafficking”,
- An interview with John Donahoe who confirmed his clear business interest in Russia: very soon launching a Russian language eBay service in the immediate future, negotiating on local partnerships on PayPal and other projects.

From the part of Russia, all reasonable high-tech business investments and partnerships are obviously useful and welcome. On the other hand, maybe there is also a strong political aspect, both internal and external. In Russian society there is a visibly growing understanding that basing national economy mainly on oil and gas is a dead end. The government seems to recognize that Putin’s slogan of stability which was politically very advantageous (and maybe initially useful) is now becoming not efficient and not popular – if not politically dangerous. Recently, President Medvedev announced a national slogan of modernization (or innovation) which sounds attractive but not very constructive. The government feels that some concrete projects should be launched, the projects that can definitely be associated (internally and externally) with the policy of innovations.

One of such innovation projects was announced by the Russian President Administration a couple weeks ago: to invest billions into building a Russian Silicon Valley near Moscow. Some aspects of the plan look at least not obviously natural: first, the government is strongly asking big Russian businesses to invest their money; second, the government itself is going to promptly (in 1-2 months) organize a selection of projects that will be invited to the new Silicon Valley; third, the government is going to broadly invite foreign specialists and managers to help bootstrapping this tech-tech zone (which maybe will have a somewhat restricted access). What is interesting, there are governmental explanations that such big high tech projects are worldwide usually organized top-down; in particular after the Moscow meetings with the USA high-tech delegation, there were official statements saying that the leading USA experts confirmed that such top-down scheme is reasonable and probably traditional.

On the other hand, many people in Russia believe that innovations should naturally arise as private initiatives in an appropriate social, economic and legal setting. In Russia there are already many interesting innovative projects (two of them that I know quite well were shown to the USA delegation in Academgorodok); and such initiatives would mushroom in a favorable atmosphere and benefit from it, and of course would be open to investment support.

So far, as Jared Cohen mentioned in his twitter, 1000 engineers from Novosibirsk are working for Microsoft, other 40,000 working in Silicon Valley, CA.

Above all, the Delegation got a lot of Siberian impressions, some of them easily extracted from twitter: snowing, frost, vodka, … , scientific broadness of the Academy, so many very clever guys, candid communication with the University students…. In particular, one can find out that it was in Siberia where John Donahoe, CEO of eBay, decided to join Twitter – however with a specific name @TallBoy6.

One can read official news about this visit at the US Government web page – marked as “diplomacy in action” with a photo of Ashton Kutcher speaking to Siberian schoolchildren (however not seen at the pic). A much more informative English article is U.S. Government, Geek Luminaries: To Russia With Tech .
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AutoCAD for $50: Scandalous Suspension of torrents.ru in Moscow

Yesterday a discussion section of the Autodesk Russian web site was attacked by numerous angry users of torrents.ru. The Autodesk web site administrators had to clean up their pages from obscene words blaming Autodesk as guilty for temporary closing of the very popular torrents.ru which then moved from Russian hosting to rutracker.org.

The closing was initiated by the Moscow prosecutor's office which opened an investigation against the web site. The investigation has found that torrents.ru users downloaded illegal software – in particular, those of Autodesk and of 1C (the largest and a very popular Russian ERP vendor). For example, a purchase of AutoCAD for the price $50 was traced to torrents.ru.

As I can conclude from the discussion at the Autodesk Russian web site, the company denies any explicit or implicit suggestions that these actions would have been performed on behalf of Autodesk which got the news in the same way as all other people – from the media, meaning that law executors never ask the right holders what should be done to lawbreakers.

For me, the key point of this episode is that among angry comments at the forums there was no blaming of the illegal software downloading. In particular, in a related discussion at isicad.ru (where I am the editor) one of the angry CAD professionals, an active visitor of isicad.ru who does not look like a friend of Autodesk:), argued that the prosecutor's decision was not fair because (a) “in Russia you can buy illegal software everywhere almost for free; this is a basic feature of Russian mentality” and (b) can’t believe that Autodesk did not itself initiate the case.

So, many people in Russia believe that a simple and straightforward interpretation of the torrents.ru case (and similar cases) is improbable; and prefer looking for some underlying reasons. A nice example is an opinion – repeatedly expressed at some web forums – that recent severity of the Moscow prosecutor's regarding torrents.ru is related to a current visit of a USA high-tech delegation to Russia (see my post John Donahoe, CEO of eBay, joined Twitter in Siberia): i.e., the Russian authorities are pointedly demonstrating to the international community their strong commitment to combating against illegal software and more generally – to establishing the rule of law in Russia.

Whatever it is, the actual trend is positive: compared to 90% of illegal software in the 90s, today this indicator is estimated as 70% or less. My own impression is that, in spite of the above mentioned comments, social mentality (at least in high tech) is slowly but definitely developing in the right direction.

One of the sources (in Russian): a Vedomosti newspaper article.
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