Nine participants from Russian ASCON, Fidesys, LEDAS, and TopSystems will attend COFES 2013 in Arizona

The number of COFES participants from Russia and CIS is constantly increasing. Vladimir Malukh from LEDAS-isicad was the first Russian expert who in 2009 visited COFES when the event was hardly known in Russia and the CIS; see Vladimir's isicad paper "COFES – Wish you were here".  

Awareness of COFES drastically increased in Russia and the CIS when in fall 2010 Cyon Research together with LEDAS organized a COFES-isicad event in Moscow with a keynote and general active participation of Brad Holtz.  

In 2011, a list of COFES participants included five persons from Russian companies: three - from ASCON, one - from a multi-vendor reseller Consistent Software, and Dmitry Ushakov, who at that time was LEDAS CEO; see Dmitry's isicad paper "Get back! (Personal Impressions from COFES-2011)".

Active participation of ASCON in 2011 was not casual. The company is the largest Russian CAD and PLM vendor with a well-developed MCAD KOMPAS 3D and intensively extending PLM set; it successfully competes with Autodesk in the Russian & CIS market. In 2010-2011 ASCON began to internationalize its marketing and partnership activity as well as to invest into development of SaaS, mobility, and other hot trends. It is at COFES 2011 where the managers of ASCON established close partnerships for example with Lightwork: see my interview with Clive Davies: “ASCON is proving to be the ideal partner for Lightwork Design“.  This direction of ASCON’s development continued quite successfully which is illustrated, for example, in some isicad-papers such as «ASCON Releases DEXMA as a Competitor to PLM 360» , «ASCON’s Mobilezation: My impressions from the “White Nights” Forum», and other.

In 2012, ASCON again sent its three managers to COFES, and now – in 2013, CEO Maxim Bogdanov will attend Arizona for the third time, now accompanied by Sergey Evsikov, Vice-President, Sales (left) and Alexander Golikov, Founder (right):

Currently, ASCON feels like a mature international actor. The company is providing technical assistance to COFES Russia 2013  to be held in St. Petersburg six weeks after the event in Arizona. Today, ASCON is emphasizing its openly distributed original geometric kernel C3D  – the foundation of KOMPAS 3D, its above mentioned cloud PLM DEXMA, and its traditional-style large PLM+ERP environment.      

In 2012, COFES invited six persons from Russia and the CIS. Along with the people from ASCON, there were Dmitry Kondakov from IRISOFT (a large Russian VAR of PTC and some other vendors), Alexander Bausk from Ukrainian Nuclear Structures Research Lab, and Alexey Ershov, LEDAS CEO – see his isicad paper ”Arizona Dream: A detailed informal report on COFES-2012”.

Now about COFES 2013 which starts approximately in 4 weeks. You can meet there a record number of persons from Russia (seven). Two guys from ASCON were already mentioned above.

Another participant is Vladimir A. Levin,  ScD, professor, Moscow State University, department of Mechanics and Mathematics, Computational Mechanics. 

Vladimir’s main field of interest is developing mathematical models of strength analysis of bodies under finite strains. Total number of publications: over 235, including 4 monographs. Vladimir is the founder and the head of Fidesys – a start-up which positions itself as a provider of a new generation CAE system for strengthen analysis and associated problems. 


After my blogpost was published, Anatoly Vershinin, Fidesys CTO, joined Vladimir in his visit to Arizona. 

There will be three persons from Top Systems: CEO Sergey Kuraksin, CTO Sergey Kozlov, and Sergey Bikulov, executive director (from left to right):.

Top Systems's set of traditional CAD+PLM+ERP solutions is quite well developed and  recognized in the Russia / CIS market. The key product of Top Systems, its MCAD called T-FLEX, is characterized as one of the most developed parametric system in the world market: see a detailed paper by S.Kuraksin and S.Kozlov “The Power of T-FLEX CAD Parametric Modeling”: Part I and Part II. Interestingly a paper which compared  T-FLEX and SolidWorks (the comparison made by a Top Systems’ partner in Poland) has become and until now is the most visited isicad publication since launching the portal.

It is important to mention that Top Systems is actively involved (both in management and development ) into the building of a new geometric 3D modeler RGK within a big project funded by the Russian Government and being implemented by a distributed team from several development centers of Russia. I believe that today, by visiting COFES, Top Systems is making an active step towards international market.

This time, LEDAS will be represented by the company’s COO Nikolay Snytnikov – PhD, who despite his young age (30) has already passed through a hard many-year school of participation in a cool outsourcing project for Dassault Systems (as a developer and manager), and currently he is a manager of the LEDAS part of RGK - the Russian Geometric Kernel. Within RGK, LEDAS is responsible for the development  of Boolean operations,  fast NURBS library,  some parallelization tasks, and other hard problems (see “LEDAS Experts: How our Company is Involved in Developing Russian Geometric Kernel” by A.Ershov and N.Snytnikov). Nikolay's background is in parallel computing so his visit to NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference 2012 resulted not only in a series of best-read isicad reportages but seems to bring useful knowledge to the RGK project. Since LEDAS does not compete with any CAD vendor, the company is a partner of both Top Systems and ASCON; the latter has used LEDAS service to integrate direct modeling facilities into KOMPAS 3D and is now relying on  LEDAS support in distribution and commercialization of the C3D kernel.   

As an internationally recognized provider of components (such as geometric solvers, direct modeling modules, and other) and highly-qualified software development services, LEDAS is well-known to the global market. After selling its IP to Bricsys in 2011, LEDAS has been  focusing on services, and recently the company shareholders have established an US business entity to better serve its clients worldwide. On the other hand, competence, skills, experience, and creativity enabled LEDAS experts to formulate a number of new project/technology ideas related to some hot topics of engineering software such as interoperability, etc. Nikolay Snytnikov is going to Arizona to strengthen some existing contacts, to seek for the new service contracts, and to look for the partners interested in joint business projects. As a member of the editorial board and a fruitful writer for isicad.ru, Nilolay will also send us his reports from the Arizona event.

Two Russian Geometric Kernels will be presented in detail at COFES Russia 2013

I'm sure most of you know what is COFES - Congress On the Future of Engineering Software. May be some of you have participated in this unique event, which since 2000 has been  organized in Arizona by Cyon Research. Probably regional COFES events are less known; they are held in the regions that either can provide new valuable experience to the global community or can perceive new development impulse from the global community, or both. In autumn 2010, an experimental regional COFES Russia event was held in Moscow together with the isicad Forum, and a couple of months later COFES Israel was organized in Tel-Aviv.

The next regional COFES event, COFES Russia 2013 – now in a strictly traditional COFES format – will be held in Peterhof, a world famous suburb of St.Petersburg (its key elements  were created according to the plans of Peter the Great) . The registration  is already opened.  Let us take a quick look at the agenda which is being steadily extended step by step.

First, according to the regular structure of COFES events, you can see a number of Analyst and User Briefings. Without going into the details of this genre, I'll just give a list of the names of moderators and some of the topics: Allan Behrens (Taxal Limited) - Model-Based Engineering, Peter Bilello (CIMdata) - Software Delivery: Moving to the Cloud and Changing Business Models, Nick Nisbet (AEC3) - Learning from the BIM Revolution in the UK, Jon Peddie (Jon Peddie Research), Jim Brown (Tech Clarity), Chris De Neef (Fast Track Consulting), Alex Bausk (PSACEA) - Model-Based Engineering in the Context of AEC and BIM, Peter Thorne (Cambashi) - ALM and PLM Grow Closer, Marina Korol - What Mandated BIM Might Mean for Russia, Phares Noel (Cyon Research) - Integrating of Point Clouds into the Flow of Design and Engineering…

Second, you can see a panel discussion “Perspectives on PLM” moderated by Brad Holtz, the President of Cyon Research and COFES:

Third, the agenda includes a keynote of Jesse Devitte (Borealis Ventures) and Tech Soft 3D Customer Event: why not to find new points of investments and new clients on the definitely very active market of Russia and CIS?

I want to pay special attention to the forthcoming presentation of two Russian geometric kernels.

One of them is C3D - an original kernel of ASCON, which has been for many years successfully used within the company’s flagship product KOMPAS 3D, and recently, as a component, has been brought to the open market ("ASCON Releases C3D Kernel for the CAD Component Market").  The kernel will be presented in particular at the Labs Customer Meeting to be held in the morning of May 30 (COFES Russia will be officially opened in the afternoon). Note that ASCON will also use one of the key COFES options called Technology Suite Briefing which provides an opportunity to openly discuss C3D  (and maybe other technology achievements of the company) with all participants of the event who want to know the technology and business details.

Another Russian kernel  RGK  (Russian Geometric Kernel) is currently being constructed within a national project with a leading role of Top Systems. (see “Russian National 3D Kernel”). Top Systems is known by its advanced 3D parametric CAD TFLEX (see "The Power of T-FLEX CAD Parametric Modeling") and intensive development of PLM (see the above mentioned PLM panel discussion).  At COFES Russia, Top Systems will also use the opportunities of a technology suite briefing. In addition, Russian 3D Kernel will be discussed at one of the 90-minute roundtable discussions.

Both ASCON and Top Systems have very qualified development teams that confirm a well-known fundamental math and engineering culture of Russia at a full scale. Both companies are increasingly investing in their global marketing, and COFES Russia 2013 provides one more opportunity to present their offerings internationally. (Note that ASCON and probably Top Systems will participate also in COFES 2013 in Arizona). We are looking forward to seeing interesting discussions and maybe heated debates.  

LEDAS is always (especially after selling its IP for the component products to Bricsys) lucky of keeping a position of not being a competitor to any vendors. In particular, the company is a reseller (better to say - VAR) of ASCON’s C3D  ("LEDAS to Distribute ASCON’s C3D Modeling Kernel Internationally") and at the same time is an active developer of RGK (see "LEDAS Assists STANKIN to Develop a New 3D Modeling Kernel" and 

"LEDAS Experts: How our Company is Involved in Developing Russian Geometric Kernel".
Three or four leading LEDAS experts will participate in COFES Russia 2013. 

As for the environment and cultural program of COFES Russia 2013, you can find some hints in the agenda, take a look at the pictures in my blog, or of course look in the Internet for a huge amount of information about Peterhof and St.Peterburg.

T-FLEX CAD – the King of Parametrization

This week, the Russian CAD/PLM company Top Systems celebrates its 20 years. Founded during difficult economic post-Sovient times by graduates of "STANKIN" (Moscow Technological University), Top Systems vigorously developed and released a full-scale parametric CAD called T-FLEX and soon after became one of the leaders of the market of CAD-related engineering software created in Russia. By now, Top Systems offers a broad spectrum of CAD+PLM solutions partially extended to the ERP direction.

See English publications about Top Systems in «The Russian MCAD Market» by Ralph Grabowski,  «T-FLEX Parametric CAD» by Deelip Menezes, as well as at http://www.tflex.com and www.isicad.net .

Today, isicad.ru published the first part of the article “T-FLEX CAD – the King of  Parametrization” (in Russian) in which two key founders of the company, Sergey Kuraksin (CEO) and Sergey Kozlov (CTO), in many details and with 32 video describe their approach and achievements regarding  parametrization  in T-FLEX CAD. The photo below taken from this paper shows the authors 20+ years ago.

DS increases its annual sales in Russia by 30%

Laurent Valroff, the director of DS Russia, was recently interviewed by the Russian review “Expert”. Two key points of the answers are

- Rumors of the death of Russian industry are greatly exaggerated,

- PLM solutions in Russia are distributed faster than globally: the fact which DS has been successfully using.

Mr Valroff has mentioned some Russian industries that rather actively assimilate modern technologies of engineering, digital design, simulation, and manufacturing: space & aircraft, automotive, shipbuilding, defense, energy, industrial equipment, and production of apparel and consumer goods. In contrast to them, electronics, medical equipment, and pharmaceutics are technologically not well developed, while in the West these sectors are today main drivers of the demand for high tech. As for AEC, this very large sector of Russian market still did not completely recover from the crisis of 2008.  

Mr Valroff gave two examples of the success stories: one related to nuclear energy stations, another - to modernization of AutoVAZ which is being implementing together with Renault. In the latter case, a new DS platform 3DEXPERIENCE can already be used.

Mr Valroff said that in 2011, DS increased its sales in Russia by at least 30%. During next three years, DS plans to double their sales in Russia.

Source (in Russian)

ASCON successfully held its customer forum in a strikingly nice place near St.Petersburg

I have just published at isicad.net a comparatively long article describing a recently held ASCON’s Forum which demonstrated strong aspiration of the company to become global.

The titles of the paper paragraphs give some idea of the content:

1. General info from CEO

2. 3D-kernel as a strong marketing message

3. How ASCON reacts to global trends

4. LOTSMAN-PDM:AEC for Android/iOS as an example of how ASCON reacts to the market trends

5. Customer’s presentations

6. My meetings with ASCON’s top managers

7. ASCON’s corporate review “Stremlenie” (Aspiration)

8. Peterhof: an ideal place to hold an efficient international event.

9. One of my recommendations to ASCON.

Here is the paper and this are some pictures of the place in question (from Google pictures, click to enlarge):

They have had a chance to see SolidWorks 2015

Every month a Russian CAD/PLM web portal isicad.ru produces a virtual release by publishing a market review, distributing an editorial column, designing a special cover page, composing a pdf with the most interesting articles of the last month, and other. Although all this is intended for those who can read Russian, I hope some of the others will not consider as a spam the information I am giving below.  

The yesterday-issued cover page of February was inspired by SolidWorks World 2012 and obviously by “Back to the Future”. The key title under the picture says: “What will happen with SW in the future?”:

By today, our collection of monthly cover pages contains 40 pictures always intended to reflect some important monthly market developments: please take a look at them here (some of them are flash animated). Our monthly reviews are typically composed by Vladimir Malukh, the LEDAS/isicad leading CAD expert. His review from February “SolidWorks 2015 will be implemented!” as well as the full long list of his articles since 2007 can be found here.

My February editorial was called “Love for a software system: is this the engine or brake of its progress?”, the title inspired by a recent Randall Newton’s remark about the problems SW has with its customers who adore the system. The links to my previous monthly papers can be found at this page.

The monthly pdf digest as usual contains the most visited articles (but not news neither press-releases), the 105 pages issue of February is here.

If you decide to use any automatic tools for translation of, say, my editorials, please don’t be too surprised or disappointed: usually these texts are quite sensitive to the context/ discourse of Russia and national communities.  

    

Note that the isicad project also supports a modest English version of the isicad portal. At this web site you can easily find some English articles/reviews reflecting developments of the Russian and CIS market. Recently I’ve outlined this web site in my paper “NURBS, BIM, orRevolution: which topics are most attractive for the readership?”. This is a small collection of the English cover pages (see the page with this set of pictures):

ASCON and UTAC launch QiBox - integrated solution to optimize pre-production in automotive industry

Today ASCON announced launching an integrated solution for control of pre-production in automotive industry according to ISO/TS 16949 standard. The solution called QiBox (quality-in-box) has been developed in cooperation with a French consulting company UTAC known as an auditor of quality control systems at Renault-Nissan. QiBox is announced as oriented for "improving the work of component suppliers during pre-production phase in automotive industry". It includes module ANPQP - a module which implements quality control at Renault-Nissan in the form of automated business-process as well as output documentation.  

As announced, QiBox includes CAPP VERTICAL  and PDM LOTSMAN (both from ASCON) and can work with any industrial CAD.

Source: ASCON's press-release (Russian)

See also:

ASCON, the Largest Russian CAD/PLM Company: Results of 2010 and Plans for 2011 

ASCON to distribute a full scale 3D CAD for $50 

Why COFES? Today ASCON knows the answer

UTAC website

Thanks to DS and Siemens, Russian PLM market in August was completely devoted to aviation

DS and SPLM are always competing in the Russian aircraft industry however in this August the companies marketing activity seems to become record-breaking. One of the reasons is a traditional biennial Aviation&Space salon MAKS  held  about 10 days ago near Moscow. Within two weeks isicad.ru received from DS and SPLM five (5) press-releases: two of them described effective participation of DS in MAKS, one from SPLM announced that Ukrainian aircraft company “Antonov” for its transport planes selected NX and Teamcenter (btw Antonov also uses DS solutions), while two more press-releases announced that both companies are very closely cooperate with Moscow Aviation Institute (MAI).

DS has installed in MAI five hundred (500!) licenses of SolidWorks Campus, organizes education process based on SW and CATIA for junior and senior courses correspondingly, and apply SW for industrial design of light aircrafts in educational center of MAI.

The SPLM press-release announces deployment of all company’s PLM solutions for all elements of the educational process of MAI.    

Also note that both DS and SPLM actively contributed to the design of the Russian Superjet-100. 

Some Russian links:

Dassault Systèmes announce cooperation with Moscow Aviation Institute

Siemens PLM Software and Moscow Aviation Institute announce extension of their cooperation

Innovation technologies of Dassault Systèmes at MAKS-2011

ANTONOV selects Siemens PLM Software solutions to implement projects for transport aviation

Dassault Systèmes held its press-conference at  MAKS-2011

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:) 

CIMdata evaluates PLM-market in 2010 and gives optimistic forecasts

isicad is proud of its fruitful contacts with CIMdata established at least in 2006 when Ken Amann, at that time - Director of Research at CIMdata, as a keynote speaker, participated in the Second International Multi-vendor isicad Forum in Novosibirsk. Since that time isicad.ru has multiply published in Russian summaries from CIMdata global reports and other materials that contributed to the PLM awareness and progress of the Russia & CIS market.

In March (USA) and April (Europe), CIMdata has held (and will in May hold in Japan) its PLM Global Vendor Forums where in particular presented its comprehensive analysis of the state, trends, and forecasts of the world PLM market. CIMdata has kindly provided isicad with the full presentations and permitted us to publish our own summary, comments, and conclusions that probably give to many readers a rather clear impression of what, according to CIMdata, PLM is today and will be tomorrow.

As far as I understand, until now CIMdata has published only a brief press-release about the Vendors Forums, therefore I hope that the isicad article "CIMdata evaluates PLM-market in 2010 and gives optimistic forecasts" prepared by Vladimir Malukh, will be useful for many readers.

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".

About DS Marketing: The Road to CATIA V6 and SolidWorks through Facebook

On October 14, Alexey Ershov, CTO LEDAS attended Dassault Systemes’ PLM Forum, traditionally held in Moscow hotel Radisson Slavyanskaya. The purpose of Alexey were business negotiations and meetings, though along the way he served as a correspondent of isicad.ru, preparing a report from the Forum and taking an interview with Thierry Collet, Dassault Systemes Vice-President on marketing and education.

Here some of the questions:

• Some customers still use CATIA V5 and even CATIA V4. What are your thoughts about CATIA V6 market history as Vice President, Global Marketing & Education?
• In Russia SolidWorks is considered as a mature solution with a rich set of features, probably, the best in its class. Perhaps, there is a big potential for SolidWorks market growth (by the way, it is for sure used illegally by many engineers). Why Dassault Systemes does not endeavor to promote SolidWorks as much as CATIA, in particular, has no SolidWorks representative office?
• CATIA Geometric Modeler (CGM) is a new product on the market although it has been used internally in CATIA for a long time. What is the reason to make it a public product now?
• Certainly CAA licenses are less popular than CATIA itself. Do you have a specific strategy to sell CAA licenses in rather small Russian market?
• A significant part of Russian industry is giant factories inherited from the USSR. Do you use any specific ways to deal with their bureaucratic apparatus and style of decision-making?
• What is an impact of social networks on marketing and sales – in Russia and worldwide? Are social networks able to penetrate the world of big corporations or, maybe, they are useful for selling CATIA to smaller customers?
• Was your experience at Oracle useful at Dassault Systemes? Is it hard to “switch” from ERP to CAD or these areas have a lot in common? Do you think that business processes in all world-level corporations are just the same?
• Is Dassault Systemes’ 3dvia.com service commercially successful?

See a full text of the interview.

See an illustrated report of the DS PLM Forum.

What browsers are preferred in the Russian CAD market?

Recently published data presents that probably for the first time, Internet Explorer has less than a half (49,87%) of the world browsers usage; in previous month it was 51,34% while a year ago 58,37%. Firefox has very stable second position with about 31% , and Chrome is the third: during the last year it has grown from 3,69 to 11,54%.

In Europe IE had in September 40,3% and 52,3% in North America.

In Russia such statistics is quite different: Firefox is a stable leader with 33,03%, and then: Opera (30,18%), IE (25,61%), and Chrome 8,84%.

A picture above shows statistics related to the visitors of www.isicad.ru. These data may be considered as characteristic for CAD/PLM vendors / distributors / advanced customers in Russia and CIS.

COFES-Russia and isicad-2010: Program Update

NB: if you came to this post after May 4, please go to COFES-Russia program update published at isicad.net where some new editing has been made.

***

COFES-Russia seminar organized by Cyon Research and LEDAS will be held in Moscow on September, 21. The seminar is organized in the framework of the 4th International Forum isicad powered by LEDAS. See some related references below.

A week ago, the event’s program was refined and included – somewhat in traditions of COFES – a number of working groups (WG). Organizing committee in coordination with Brad Holtz has specified six WGs. There will be two rounds (in total – 3 hours) each round includes three WGs that will be working in parallel during 1.5 hours. After these rounds are over, there will be a joint integrating round table + press-conference.

Following 6 working groups are planned.

1. Direct Modeling as a Basis of Future Intelligent CAD
Creation and editing engineering data
- Comparative analysis of history-based parametric modeling with direct geometry editing: advantages and drawbacks of each approach
- Presentation of direct editing tools in popular CAD packages
- How to keep design intent in history-free environment
- What will be the CAD exchange format after 50 years

2. News & trends in PLM/PDM
Engineering data management:
- Key tasks of PLM in the next decade
- Digital Prototyping vs. Full-Scale PLM
- Open-source PLM/PDM
- Integrated PLM-ERP-MES Systems
- Cloudy PLM

3. Marketing and Advertizing in the Era of Global Social Networks
New ways of engineering software marketing:
- Rich 3D Media vs. paper media
- Social Networks and Communities
- Inbound Marketing, Community Building,...

4. CAD-training for future engineers
- Early CAD education in the school
- Software Users or Engineers?
- More discoverable software
- On-line e-books and trainings
- The role of 3D Media in the education process
- The role of new hardware devices in the education: Google Set Top, iPad, ...

5. New business-models for engineering software
- Cloud computing and SaaS
- FOSS(Free and Open Source Software)CAD/CAM/CAE/PLM...

6. New hardware technologies for engineering software
- GPU usage in CAD/CAM/CAE
- 3D pointing devices and multi-touch.
- 3D printing
- Augmented reality

Everybody is kindly invited to give their comments and propose more hot topics.

Related references:
- Brief COFES-Russia English info
- Russian isicad-2010 web site
- Cyon Research announces COFES Russia Seminar in partnership with LEDAS
- COFES-Russia Seminar and Multi-vendor Forum isicad-2010 in Moscow
- HP and PTC support COFES-Russia Seminar in September 2010
- Join Deelip Menezes to attend COFES-Russia and isicad-2010 in Moscow
- Previous isicad Forums: 2004, 2006, and 2008
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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":).

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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