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.

October helps to better understand the market of Engineering Software in Russia: ASCON, Autodesk, COFES Russia, Top Systems, SW, DS, Delcam-ESI…

I have just published at isicad.net an overview of the Russian market based on the vendor's events held in October. The first paragraph of the report says:

 The cover of the 99th issue (October, 2012) of isicad.ru reflects several events related to the Russian market of engineering software (see all the covers). Some of them mainly belong to the genre of marketing. However, smart marketing not only can shape customers’ demands but in the long run transforms vendor’s virtual manipulations into their innovative software… Some important characteristics of the Russian market are described in the reports from numerous events held in October. Unfortunately, most of the links are in Russian however, I will try to give you some flavor of the state of art.

Here are the titles of the report sections:

October, 2. ASCON’s autumn harvest

October, 2-4. Bricsys Technologies Russia is moving Bricsys into the MCAD niche

BTW: ZWSOFT.ru 

Octover, 3 and 4. The First Autodesk University in Russia

October, 6. Towards COFES Russia 2013

October 8. Lotsia Soft, the Russian PLM leader?

October 16-18. Top Systems presents its successful experience of development & installation of PLM+ERP

October 18. SolidWorks has a lot of very devoted and compassionate fans in Russia: can it increase the company’s Russian market share?

October 19. Bernard CHARLES visited Moscow to announce that DS leaves its competitors alone to play with PLM

October 18-25. By hosting ESI-Russia, Delcam Ural strengthens its already strong multi-VAR position

October 25-29. SDI Solution is a partner of everybody?

October 30. Location and industrial development of Yekaterinburg attract all vendors.

See the full text of the report.

Just published at isicad.net: The Power of T-FLEX CAD Parametric Modeling. Part I - with 30 video clips

isicad.net has just published "The Power of T-FLEX CAD Parametric Modeling. Part I"  by CEO and CTO of Top Systems, a leading Russian privately held CAD/PLM company which this summer celebrated its 20^th anniversary. The company is known first of all by its well-developed parametric MCAD system T-FLEX, which is quite popular in Russia and CIS and, probably, when supported by a powerful marketing, could become popular globally. You can find some characteristics of T-FLEX in “T-FLEX Parametric CAD” by Deelip Menezes , “The Russian MCAD Market” by Ralph Grabowski, and in multiple publications of isicad.net – such as for example  “T-FLEX CAD 12 Released”.
  

Experts and developers of Top Systems has accumulated a huge competence and experience in engineering software, and nobody was surprised to learn at the beginning of 2012 that Top Systems became one of the key contractors of the Russian Geometric Kernel project.

Top Systems has step by step built a full scale PLM environment – also integrated with a number of ERP-modules. Some intermediate results of this direction were presented at seminar COFES-Russia/isicad-2010. I hope that attendees of the planned COFES-Russia/isicad-2013 will be able to learn much about the latest PLM-results of Top Systems – called PLM+.

Interesting to mention that couple days ago, I wrote in @levin_david: “Today the isicad.ru article (from May 21) which compares SolidWorks vs Russian T-FLEX received a comment No.1000  http://bit.ly/OvjgOQ“.  I believe that Top Systems has not yet realized its full potential and hopefully this richly illustrated paper will increase global awareness of the company, its solutions, and competence.  

Part II soon to appear. 

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.

Russia invests 690 000 000 rubles into building a national 3D solid modeling kernel

Last week, a Russian daily Izvestia published an article which announced the completion of the tender whose topic was “Building of a national 3D solid modeling kernel”. The winner is a well-known MOSCOW STATE TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY "STANKIN", one of the leading technical universities in Russia and likely in Europe. (STANKIN is an abbreviation for machine-tool institute). The main comment for Izvestia was given by Sergey Kuraksin, presented by the daily as the CEO of the engineering center of STANKIN. The CAD market perfectly knows Sergey mainly as the CEO of Top Systems, one of the leading Russian CAD/PLM companies whose offerings include 3D CAD TFlex and a developed PLM set of products. 

Another participant of the tender was TsAGI, The Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute named after N.Zhukovsky. TsAGI is world known by fundamental contributions into the Soviet and Russian aviation and space industry.

Of course the tender was open; all its minor details (see a link below) seem to confirm that although TsAGI is obviously a unique engineering institution, its skills and experience in software engineering look substantially less than those of STANKIN (especially together with Top Systems).  

The investment into the project is 690M RUR (today ~22M USD) for 3 years. Parasolid is indicated “as a functional prototype” for the project.

Izvestia gives a brief characteristics of what the modeling kernel is, mentions the component's key importance for industry, and says that today the world and Russian industry use such imported products as Parasolid and other – produced more than 20 years ago. (Note that ASCON, a leading Russian CAD/PLM provider, has its in-house modeling kernel which is so far used only for the company's products such as well-known KOMPAS 3D). 

The article also quotes some external expert opinions that are generally skeptical. One of them says that building a software is not a key point and reminds that Siemens has a very large team to maintain Parasolid. The same expert is surprised how TsAGI which has a great “experience in plane design could fail in tender with STANKIN”. Another person, a manager from SolidWorks Russia, explains that end-users do not care what modeling kernels are used in applications and added that “his company is not going to replace Parasolid with something else”.

Links:

An article in Izvestia 

All details of the tender 

STANKIN full web site in Russian , Some words about STANKIN in English 1, --- in English 2 

TopSystems , full Web site in Russian  

TsAGI 

T-FLEXCAD 12 and KOMPAS-3D V13 confirm high activity of the Russian MCAD market 

T-FLEX CAD 12 and KOMPAS-3D V13 confirm high activity of the Russian MCAD market

As the editor-in-chief of isicad.ru/net, I've just received a letter (written in English!) from the marketing department of the Russian CAD/PLM company Top Systems. The attachment included an English press-release announcing T-FLEX CAD 12. I believe this 3D CAD, quite popular at the Russian/CIS market, is really globally competitive and hope this publication: "T-FLEX CAD 12 Released" helps its promotion:

English press-releases are already quite usual for ASCON (see for example my recent overview) but it's nevertheless pleasant to see that in today's issue of tenlinks ASCON release of KOMPAS-3D V13 shares the first line with DS CATIA Sketcher:  

By the way, may be the isicad.net Top-10 will be of some interest for you:

The isicad.net Overview of the Russian CAD/PLM Market, May-October 2011

Here are some key topics of the overview:

- After 5 years of successful work for Autodesk CIS, Alex Tasev becomes head of PTC CIS and reports outstanding results of PTC at CIS market

- Dassault Systemes and Siemens PLM extend their Russian offices and demonstrate good spirit

- SolidWorks is still inarticulate in Russia in spite of very much respect to its software

- Top Systems emphasises its extended PLM orientation and integrates with Autodesk Inventor

Marketing and Internet in Russia

- Autodesk CIS Forum held on 21-22 of September was the most striking event of the year

- ASCON is probably the most dynamic company at the Russian CAD/PLM market

- LEDAS extended the range of its business interests and genres

- Bentley Systems becomes much more visible at the Russian market

- NanoCAD 3.0 2011 ~ AutoCAD LT 2009

The full overview is here .  The cover page of N25 (see below) has been inspired by a well-known fair-tale and an article “How Direct Modeling Transforms Cinderella into the Princess” (see a link in the overview). Please click the picture to enlarge and see a flash animated version (i.e. not for i-devices).

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

Russian CAD/PLM Market: May-Oct, 2010

If you don't receive by e-mail my quaterly overviews of the Russian CAD/PLM market, you can take a look at a web variant of the today's report at isicad.net. Below I put an introduction for this paper.

Basically, we use news, press-releases, and papers published earlier at isicad.net. However few actors of the Russian market produce English publications about their local activity in Russia. In important cases, we try to retell their Russian news just in our own words. Since autumn of 2009, we’ve got a great support from bloggers and journalists who write in English and visit(ed) Russia: this started from a remarkable series of Ralph Grabowski and then was continued by Deelip Menezes, Oleg Shilovitsky, and hopefully, Martyn Day.

isicad.ru has no data from vendors about current volumes of their sales but general situation at the Russian CAD/PLM market is characterized by:
- nobody mentions crisis,
- everybody publishes news about new contracts and organizes big conferences and seminars everywhere in Russia.

My own formulations of companies' news in few words are as follows:
- 1C with its huge small-ERP reselling network and together with APPIUS is getting closer and closer to PLM,
- ASCON strongly emphasizes its SaaS / cloud service but does not forget improving its MCAD,
- Autodesk CIS is more and more improving communication with mass Russian market,
- Dassault Systemes promotes its social networking and continues working with big industries,
- LEDAS reconfigures its business and persistently moves towards implementation of direct modeling and its applications,
- Nanosoft continues promotion of its native free platforms but balances this by more reselling of Western products,
- PTC is enhancing its (already strong) distribution network,
- Siemens PLM promotes its ST3 and continues working with big industries.
- Top Systems announced that they have a full-scale world-class PLM.

See the whole paper with a dozens links here.

My vision of the plenary session at isicad-2010/COFES

In these remarks I would like to review the plenary (morning) session of isicad-2010 / COFES-Russia.

I must confess that initially we had hot discussions with Brad Holtz about the style of this event. Brad reasonably wished it to be a COFES Forum, and I was trying to explain that Russian vendors or (to be more precise) vendors in Russia are more used to workshops, which enable to supply certain vendor information to the audience (primarily – tell your clients about your solutions), while forums as some kind of meetings to discuss problems common to all attendees raise some doubts in the eyes of our vendors … The ends were gained by a kind of art: isicad-2010 is boldly called Forum and COFES-Russia goes by seminar – just in case... :). I take the liberty to further on refer to our common event as the Forum.

Jokes aside, overall the event has good chances to become a true Forum. First, the Working Groups and the concluding Round Table (combined with a press-conference) undoubtedly are the sites for forum discussions. Second, the final composition and format of plenary sessions justify the Forum style - if not completely, than certainly to a considerable degree. To be able to include maximum possible number of conceptual talks, we have drastically cut down the average time for presentations, introducing three options: 5, 10 and 15 minutes (excluding the Invited Talk). It is implied that to outline the essential ideas and concepts, define global trends, specify generally important problems, and the like, does not require too much time, unlike describing features of a new product or its new version. I’d like to emphasize that all speakers and companies that they represent showed full understanding of this approach and did not insist on extended time for their talks.

For advertizing, I dared translate into Russian the title of the invited talk by Brad Holtz simply as “A Vision of Global CAD/PLM Market till 2015”. In original it sounds more sophisticated: «Cyon Research Report: A vision of global market dynamics for design and engineering software, including results and implications of recent surveys of the global engineering software community».

Martin Steuer, who represents Autodesk – the general Forum partner, will focus on the issue that, gradually overcoming public skepticism, is becoming more and more pressing – the role of “sustainable design”. The established Russian translation (“environmentally rational design”) somewhat reduces the idea of globality, while an English word sustainable emphasizes fundamental concept of sustainable development which is more and more globally recognized as a scenario for survival of mankind. Thus sustainable design can be considered as a projection of a world-wide objective to our industry. Today most market leaders devote much attention to this topic, and Autodesk have accumulated considerable and generally valuable results in this field.

The 5-minute talk by Oleg Shilovitsky is the introduction to the agenda of No.1 Working Group: "Trends in PLM” and an invitation to active participation in discussions. Besides, Oleg believes that the boundaries between not always clearly defined PLM, ERP, PDM, CAD,.. should and will become more precise in the future... Today these boundaries are mostly tentative, thus the solutions are far from being steady and reflect a mesmeric magic of Three-Letter-Acronyms (TLAs)...

Representatives of those vendors that successfully implement such solutions in real markets on a daily basis, may justly disagree with magically vague interpretations of such concepts as PLM. The presentation of Laurent Valroff and Artem Avedyan (Dassault Systemes) promises to demonstrate to us that development of today’s TLA is related not only or not so to the need for significant clarification of basic solutions, but rather to expansion of the field of employment of such solutions. The expansion that may turn out to be quite radical and not so obvious.

Sergey Kuraksin will certainly his express not less (and possibly even more) pragmatic vision of PLM. What kind of magic we can talk about if Top Systems has developed and is implementing a PLM-package, understood not only as a full-scale world-class system for which there is real demand, but also as a system with important embedded qualities so vital precisely for a Russian market. Perhaps the global market should pay more attention to this solution?

The 5-minute talk by Deelip Menezis is the introduction to the agenda of No.2 Working Group: “Intelligent methods of 3D-modeling”. Whatever you may say, but the issues of geometry concern majority of vendors and users, therefore any news that some cure-all solution has been found (direct modeling? synchronous technology?) leave no one indifferent, and today every global CAD leader must have an actual or an announced solution in this field. However, Deelip Menezis, who is familiar with all such solutions of the industry leaders, recently wrote in his blog that in Moscow he would state that contrary to the rumors the problems of geometry were not solved at all (“nothing is further from the truth”).

After such Deelip’s statement, the 15-minute presentation of Bruno Chollat “The Role of 3D Direct Modeling in the Product Development Cycle” will be especially interesting to listen to. Bruno represents SpaceClaim, which is positioned as the leader in the field of direct modeling, and, judging by the title of his presentation, he interprets this technology as today’s reality.

Another counterbalance to a useful Deelip’s skepticism will be the 5-minute talk by Dmitry Ushakov, of LEDAS. The company is developing a version of direct modeling, which emphasizes the end quality – automated support of user’s intent rather than technically important and actually supported by LEDAS characteristics (parameterization and history-free design). At No.2 Working Group Dmitry plans to give a more detailed account of the opinion of LEDAS experts the true essence of intelligent 3D-modeling.

According to the preliminary statistics, the most popular Working Group, and its agenda, promises to be WG-5 "New Business Models for CAD/PLM market (cloud computations, open code, free platforms…)". It is not surprising that ultimately everyone is interested in business... Nanosoft Company recently has broken into the market with sensational business models, first of all, based on a free-of-charge platform. Thus, the presentation of Nanosoft CEO Maxim Egorov should be of special interest: we hope to learn about the company’s experience, possible evolution of its business policy and even “unclassified” plans. This presentation can be the introduction to WG-5, which will also be moderated by a Nanosoft representative Dmitry Popov.

Most certainly WG-5 will have an exciting discussion as ASCON has registered as one of the active group members. The title of a short introductory presentation “Russian CAD companies will not wait for imported wings to take off to clouds”, which on behalf of ASCON will be delivered by Oleg Zykov, is self-explanatory. At WG-5 Oleg hopes to support his plenary talk with a short demonstration.

IT history goes along with the drama of software developers: to some extent their heroic intellectual deeds and breakthrough are often devaluated by subsequent hardware development. It is simply my flirtatious self-irony: in fact I am convinced that achievements and endeavors of software programmers are not in vain, they will always be required and their devaluation is not possible… Still, new hardware capabilities certainly open totally new horizons and software developers must be extremely sensitive and closely follow hardware development so their next heroic deeds are not based on obsolete platforms… That is why the talk of Anton Dzhoraev (NVIDIA) is so important to us. “New graphical capabilities to support next CAD generation” will round up the plenary morning session. Anton will continue his talk at WG-6 “New Hardware Technologies for Engineering Software”.

New hardware technologies certainly cover state-of-the art broad-format printing that will be generously demonstrated by HP – the general Forum sponsor. In the lobby HP will organize a display/exhibition of its new products and their capabilities will be discussed at WG-6. HP capacity will be further demonstrated at the exhibition of students projects.

See also Round Tables and Their Moderators... and Media at COFES-Russia... .