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 . 

Oleg Shilovitsky unveils his Inforbix to arrange and maintain mixtures of chaotic product data

Thanks to my Siberian time difference I have an unusual chance to publish this news before Deelip Menezes:). And probably - before Oleg himself.

The new company is Inforbix.

Note that

- Oleg have been working for 10+ as a key technological specialist at DS/Smarteam,

- approximately the same competence has Vadik Vaksin - the chief developer of a new company,

- Oleg's co-founder is Anatoly Savin - a very experienced expert and businessman,

- among the advisors we can see Brad Holtz.

Therefore probably we will not wait 20 years:) to see a revolution in processing of product data.

Well, I invested all available early morning resources into my more or less detailed Russian post. here I just want to congratulate Oleg, his partners, and (future) customers.

This is a summary Oleg gave to me:

"1. Product data are located in many "data sources" in an organization (CAD files, Excel, databases, enterprise systems-PLM, ERP,CRM...)

2. Product data belongs to different "functional domains" - sales, marketing, engineering, manufacturing, support etc.

3. We want to provide an easy way to retrieve product data in a meaningful way, which means:

-- combine pieces of information coming from multiple places

-- search across multiple data sources

-- allows navigation between connected pieces of data (i.e. 3D CAD, Excel with BOM, 2D drawing in manufacturing, emailmentioning, BOM in PLM, sales order, support request in CRM)

-- allow slice & dice data in different forms - mashup data (i.e tables).

Our current phase is "design partnership". We work with design partners. For the moment, we are not saying names. We plan to provide this information later. We are looking for additional design partners (there is a form to submit on the website). We have few candidates inthe pipeline. The next phase will be a beta version. You can mention that system will be available first on cloud with additional components installed inside of company network.

We want to avoid two potential misinterpretation of what we do:

- This is NOT yet another "search system"

- This is NOT yet another "PLM"

PLM Think Tank and Beyond PLM will continue to be industry blogs completely independent of Inforbix and everything I will write on Beyond PLM / PLM Think Tank is my opinion and not represents my employment in Inforbix".

Round tables and their moderators at COFES-Russia / isicad-2010

Several days ago, I presented those who confirmed their participation in COFES-Russia / isicad-2010. Now – about the moderators of the working groups (WG). WG is a round-table which is intended not only to discuss an important topic but also to formulate results of the discussion and present them to the final joint round table combined with a press-conference. See the event’s agenda with the links to the detailed description of WGs.

I hope those who know Oleg Shilovitsky and Deelip Menezes will not be surprised to see them at the Moscow event not only as bloggers but also as moderators and speakers.

Oleg has over ten years successfully been working as the CTO at (ENOVIA) SmarTeam, and I believe that today he uniquely combines a very rich practical experience with corporate independence and striving for profound analysis on what’s next in PLM and around?

Deelip’s company SYCODE makes plug-ins for practically all CADs, so he must know everything. On the other hand, if you look through Deelip’s blog (for example try to search direct modeling) you can see that he thoroughly and meticulously studies the most fresh, trendy and actively developing methods for direct modeling, synchronous technology, ... and all that stuff which we codified in the name of Working Group 2: "Intelligent methods of 3D modeling”. People from at least SpaceClaim and LEDAS who are practically working in this domain will actively participate in WG-2 but Deelip is universally informative and independent...

Elena Konvisar has been in marketing for many years, today she manages this direction in a respectable integrator company NEOLANT, and is well known as an experienced moderator of round tables with participation of many CAD vendors of the Russian market: see for example, "CAD vendors without ties: a full transcript" (in Russian) . Elena asked Oleg Shilovitsky to help her: this time Oleg is involved as an active connoisseur and promoter of modern means of work in social networks.

Vladimir Talapov is for a long time productively working with students in Novosibirsk Architectural University. Vladimir has a Ph.D. in mathematics and combines the talents of a practical teacher, uninhibited brilliant orator and polemicist (see for example the article "Modern design industry is a world of greedy predators” – in Russian), as well - a connoisseur and promoter of advanced industrial technologies. The isicad-2010 exhibition presents many projects made by Vladimir’s students.

Topics related to the free platform, open source, etc., not accidentally fell into the hands of Nanosoft: see The upFront.eZine Tour of Russia. Part VI: Nanosoft. Anyone who looks at the "Who's Who" section on the company’s web site, understands that Dmitri Popov is the best candidate for being a moderator: he is from Siberia, he holds a Ph.D., and he is the author of a textbook, he was working for Xerox, he wrote a system of parametric design and he is a fan of summer skiing in the Alps ...

In the hardware working group we plan to consider several new products. Similar to the new software (WG-2), it was decided that discussion will be hold by an independent expert - Vladimir Malukh who, with his broad competence, can play a role of a customer presenting the entire field of engineering software. Vladimir is also known as an experienced moderator of round tables.

Autodesk is one of the apparent leaders in the field of AEC, in particular, in the solutions that extend design to the full cycle of integrated modeling of buildings. Pavel Hanzhenkov is the head of AEC sector at the Russian office of Autodesk with a previous experience in a similar position at Honeywell: his practical expertise has been evidently expressed in the vital topics that Pavel proposes for the discussion at WG-7.

Detailed description of all working groups is available here.