LEDAS announced the formation of Advisory Board

Together with the whole LEDAS team, I am grateful to the well-known actors of the engineering software market who kindly agreed to become members of the newly formed LEDAS advisory board:

• Ken Amann, Executive Consultant and (previously) Director of Research at CIMdata
• Francis Bernard, Founder and First President of Dassault Systèmes, awarded as being the “Inventor of CATIA”
• Brad Holtz, President & CEO, Cyon Research Co-Founder, COFES Chief Strategy Officer and Chairman, The Center for Understanding Change
• Deelip Menezes, Blogger, Founder and CEO of SYCODE, Co-Founder and CTO of Print3D Corporation
• Oleg Shilovitsky, Blogger, Independent Consultant, Founder and CEO of Inforbix

For more information (biographies, links...), please see this page of LEDAS.com . 

Francis BERNARD, Dassault Systemes, CATIA, Paris, La Terrasse, 6 October

This is not my first mention of my luck: to have a privilege to meet quite regularly with Francis. Obviously, the man who founded DS, was its first CEO, invented CATIA, so energetically  promoted PLM, and much more, can give a lot of wise recommendations on how to develop one's business related to engineering software. And he can tell you many interesting things not only about CAD.     

Recently I met Francis again. But this post is not about our discussion. I just really like this photo made in a  very Parisian location in Paris: Place de l'École Militaire, Invalides - Tour Eiffel... Francis BERNARD lives close to this place and looks here very natural (click to enlarge):

Yes, it's not about our discussion. But I should mention that Francis is very active: he is a member of the Board in 4 or 5 companies, including very famous ESI-Group. I appreciate very much his flexibility and independence in thinking which is absolutely without any of the veterans' reflexive skepticism about today's events and market trends. And most of all I like the attitude of Francis to what he dislikes: he is very definitive and unequivocal but never angry and always without any smallest signs of hatred. In particular, it's because Francis is completely confident in his personal history and does not need its retrospective optimization:)...

PS. A year ago, isicad.net published a big article by Francis The DASSAULT SYSTEMES Success Story (in English) whose Russian translation attracted a lot of attention by calm content-richness contrasted with today's style of boasting and primitive humiliation of competitors. Recently, one of the Russian readers put a comment (in my unpolished translation): "I read in one sitting! Milestones seem to me fantastic, especially with reference to the years! Just imagine: 1967-77 years, CNC machines, "the full range of applications in the field of 3D CAD / CAM" - for many businesses is now sky-high heights ... In my understanding, Francis Bernard and his team made a technological revolution! They changed the world! Bravo! Long life and good health, Francis!"

ESI Group Presented Its Solutions in Siberia

This Thursday ESI Group held its seminar in Novosibirsk Research Campus (Akademgorodok, TechnoPark, and other...) - just in the very building where LEDAS has its offices. Akademgorodok includes dozens of hi-tech institutions and enterprises that can potentially become ESI customers and even - partners in development of new solutions. At the announcement you can see the agenda and catch the domain of ESI Group products and solutions:

About ESI Group (from the company web site):

   ESI has developed an extensive suite of coherent, industry-oriented applications to realistically simulate a product's behavior during testing and real life use; to refine manufacturing processes for desired product performance, and to evaluate the effect of the environment in which the product is deployed. ESI's products represent a unique collaborative and open environment for End-to-End Virtual Prototyping.

    The company employs over 750 high-level specialists worldwide covering more than 30 countries. As announced on March 14 2011, consolidated annual revenue saw purely organic annual growth of +12.1% to 84.2 million euro. License sales increased by +14.4% to 61.9 million euro, services sales were up +6.2% over the year as a whole, to 22.3 million.

    Among recent (April ) noticeable news:

- ESI Group acquires Comet Technology Corporation's IP, including "COMET Acoustics" software for low frequency noise and vibration modeling,

- ESI named Company of the Year by the FACC, Recognizing outstanding accomplishments at fostering French-American trade.

In his presentation, Mr Stanislav Vondracek, Sales Director East Europe (who is operating from Czech Republic, Plzen city, known as one of the world beer capitals), not only gave an excellent picture of offerings but also demonstrated an outstanding competence in mathematic background of ESI products which was especially appreciated by the audience mainly consisted of mathematicians and developers of science-intensive software. In particular, this was explained to me by Alexey Ershov, LEDAS CTO, PhD in math.

My interest for ESI Group and Stanislav's visit to Novosibirsk was substantially heated by the fact that Francis Bernard (co-founder and former President of Dassault Systemes, with whom LEDAS is for a long time having fruitful and pleasant contacts) is currently a Board Director of ESI Group. Alexey Ershov discussed with Mr Vondracek possible domains of cooperation and then I was pleased to meet Stanislav in my office.

Many years ago, in the framework of academic partnership, I have very many times been in Czech Republic and believe that this is one of the most emotionally pleasant places I have ever visited.

Francis Bernard, the Founder of DS and Inventor of CATIA

In my life I was fortunate to have quite close acquaintance with several really outstanding persons. In most cases when it's about mathematics and computer science, my references would not be very convincing for the readers of this blog. Francis Bernard is likely also not a popular guy among today's young engineers who discuss their everyday problems in technical forums or in Facebook. However, the keywords are so obvious and even surprising: Francis is just a co-founder of Dassault Systemes and just the inventor of CATIA.

A reason for this post was yesterday's publication of a very interesting and detailed article "The Dassault Systemes Success Story" written by Francis - as far as I can understand - in particular thanks to the request from Deelip Menezes who has put the article in his blog which guarantees a broad enough access to the memoirs in question. Francis was very kind to simultaniously permit this publication also at isicad.net and I am proud to see his article here as well. (see also a Russian translation). Few introductory words to this isicad.net publication say: Francis Bernard is well known in Russia as the founder and first director of the office of Dassault Systems Russia. Francis have had a great personal influence on the dissemination of ideas of PLM in the Russian market. This professional and human influence was also implemented in Siberia where Francis actively participated in three isicad forums: 2004, 2006, and 2008.

When we speak about such persons, intelligence goes without saying. But above this, Francis makes me think about unique human qualities of intelligentsia in the old Russian meaning of the word...