LEDAS enhances its key business in service after selling its technologies to Bricsys

Here is some part of my motivations for selling LEDAS technologies.  

Here is a link to the official press-release of today.

Here you can see how Erik de Keyser and I signed the Agreement:

Yesterday night, Erik and I were explaining to Deelip Menezes and Ralph Grabowski some details and mutual advantages. This obviously means that soon you will likely read some weighty opinions from the bloggers:

Well, in the long run, it’s me who sold some part of my property. Therefore, you should (or must?) take my opinion into account.  Here it is.

I have sold something which was not profitable for me in direct sales however has been approved as a very valuable and efficient when applied in a proper context, by appropriate brains and hands. Therefore I’ve got adequate money while the buyer got adequate tools for faster development of his business. This means that the deal is fair and mutually beneficial.

Moreover, the Agreement is specified so that I will get a good part of the revenue to be generated by Bricsys by application of the technologies acquired from LEDAS. Therefore I am very interested  in success of this application. To decrease risk of this project, we agreed that a small team of LEDAS developers will be transferred from LEDAS to a Russian department of Bricsys soon to appear. This team will be headed by Dmitry Ushakov who is a real father of the technologies and products in question: he is the best person to efficiently apply, and when necessary, improve/adjust/update/… his technological inventions. Dmitry will quit his current position of LEDAS CEO but remains one of the key members of the LEDAS Board, leading LEDAS expert, consultant, and guru, the editor of www.isicad.ru (and www.isicad.net), and other. Dmitry will definitely continue to efficiently contribute to the business development of LEDAS.

Another important aspect of the deal with Bricsys is that LEDAS continues maintenance of the sold products and becomes their privileged distributor. In particular, no current licensee of LGSs and other components and products will be damaged.

You will inevitably ask me: is it in total something negative that during couple months LEDAS  terminated a 12-year cooperation with Dassault Systemes and sold its unique technologies? My answer is simple: if you consider not emotions, prejudices of LEDAS academic background, and inertia but instead will judge by business and growth criteria, all this is definitely positive. Today LEDAS has higher level of revenue than one year ago with DS and with the technologies. We have now much more transparent, natural, and balanced structure of the business as well as good potential for further business extension in providing highest quality service in software development (SD). Maybe “potential and future” sounds not very convincing but if you need to perform an outsourcing SD project with a unique combination of quality, reliability, and price – address LEDAS right now.  

Well, I have some more formal and informal comments on the LEDAS history, love story with DS, why Bricsys, more events from recently, and plans: Deelip Menezes kindly invited me to describe this in a guest post for his blog. I will do my best to implement this honorable invitation. 

Around Bricsys 2011 conference. Oct 4, morning

Arnold van der Weide, President of Open Design Alliance, Ralph Grabowski, The Blogger and CAD Guru, David Levin, LEDAS, Randall Newton, GraphicSpeak:

Deelip Menezes (The Blogger, CAD Guru, and capitalist) arrived:

Today, Brussels is excited by two key topics (Left - Bricsys conference, right - Sex and City ):

For more information, see #bricsys2011 on Twitter.

News from Novosibirsk: Technopark is rapidly constructed while "Siberia" beats PSV Eindhoven

Technopark in Novosibirsk Research Center (LEDAS has recently become its member) is a somewhat small but real Skolkovo. Some people believe that the Center itself (Akademgorodok) is the best and much less expensive Skolkovo. But this is another story....

As in its early days, Akademgorodok is often visited by foreign guests: from Ashton Kutcher to Ralph Grabowski. Recently BBC published a 4-minutes clip about Technopark , see a screenshot below.

Also see below two pictures about a nice football event.

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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The State of the MCAD Market in Russia

As the editor of isicad.net / isicad.ru and CEO of LEDAS, in summer 2009, I invited Ralph Grabowski to make a tour to Russia. I am happy we have together implemented this project: in early September Ralph visited St-Petersburg, Moscow, and Novosibirsk, where he attended eight CAD-related companies and (in Moscow) moderated a round table “Future of MCAD”.

The visit was in every detail described in Ralph’s well-known blog and upFront.eZine review. I don’t know the statistics of visits to those web sites but the Russian publications (at isicad.ru and at my Russian blog) that reflected Ralph’s tour were extremely popular.

Ralph has later composed a bi-lingual brochure about his Russian tour. This book (a pdf-file) became available couple days ago. A detailed info which in particular says
"the 126-page report will give you insights into the...
...history of MCAD in Russia during and after Soviet rule.
...product offerings by MCAD firms native to Russia, and from outside the country.
...special problems faced by Russian firms doing business with the West.
...challenges faced by Western MCAD firms opening branch offices in Russia"
was published as Ralph’s blog post The State of the MCAD Market in Russia .

Note that at isicad.net you can (every 2-3 months) read a summary of the news from the Russian CAD/PLM market. Here are two samples:
Brief isicad-Overview of the Russian CAD/PLM Market: Nov-Dec, 2009,
Brief isicad-Overview of the Russian CAD/PLM Market: Sept-Oct, 2009
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