3D CAD NEWS

Everyone is confused about the various roles and products that Dassault delivers – except that we all know that SolidWorks is from SolidWorks and CATIA is from Dassault, right? And most of the industry vaguely remembers that SolidWorks is owned by Dassault. What then, we ask, does Delmia, and Enovia, two other lesser known Dassault companies, actually do? No one I talk to can ever really explain what it is they do although the Dassault web site states “With DELMIA, the lean digital manufacturing processes are defined. With ENOVIA, product lifecycle information is managed in a collaborative way.” yeah. That’s clear!

Dassault has evidently realized the same, and also recognized the powerful brand that SolidWorks maintains. Thus, Dassault announced this week during the CATIA Operators’ Exchange (COE) that the SolidWorks reseller channel would now be known as the ‘Dassault Systemes Volume Channel’. Roopinder’s CAD Insider blog, where this news broke, stated that “When pressed to name what products Dassault would be pumping into the “volume channel” in the future, [Bernard] Charles was not clear.”

So, without any clarity in its complete intent, Dassault would seem to be setting up the strong SolidWorks VAR channel to be able to sell other Dassault products, along the lines of its PLM offerings for the SMB (Small-to-Medium_sized Businesses).

The grapevine indicates that SolidWorks themselves were caught flat-footed with this news, with reports of sales managers at SolidWorks unaware of the announcement even after Roopinder broke the news on his CADInsider blog.
On being contacted by various VARs SolidWorks reportedly managed to get a hurried message out to its sales channel essentially saying (I am paraphrasing) ‘Ignore! Stay focused on selling SolidWorks!’ We anticipate that SolidWorks management will have better guidance promptly for their sales team.

We believe that, if improperly managed, this move will serve to defocus the SolidWorks resellers, allowing gaps for other vendors to fill. Additional products being forced on the resellers also increases their costs of doing business, and Dassault will have to take a mature approach to tackle this or else the resellers simply will not sell those additional products.

The long run gamble is that we think SolidWorks will allow the name change, (Dassault after all does own them), but nothing will essentially change in the product line up and sales focus for the SolidWorks VARs.

Hey. Maybe they should set up a sales channel with IBM!

 

Posted by the Brat

Dassault Systemes told the world today that it is buying ICEM, which makes a surface modeling tool that runs with CATIA V5. No big surprise there; the two have been working closely together for a while.

What is a bit interesting, unless you are totally wet behind the ears and don’t give a rat’s toe about history, is that ICEM has been the proverbial red-headed foster child of the design software industry. It started out as a unit of Control Data Corporation, back when CAD computers required teams of worried-looking weenies in white coats to operate correctly. The hardware was the central sales focus then, and companies created software to drive sales.

For a while it was part of a CDC/SDRC joint venture. That deal went sour, and eventually UGS bought part of the venture, but not the part that became ICEM. (Just think how different things might be today if UGS had acquired the technology that became today’s ICEM.) Later, EDS acquired SDRC and UGS, but that’s another story.

From CDC it went to PTC, who sold it to investors, who sold it today to Dassault. PTC paid $45 million in 1993 dollars for ICEM, and probably sold it for less. Today Dassault paid 51.4 million Euros for ICEM. Somebody has made a nice bundle of money on all that churning.

In parallel universes, the software that created these lines belongs to UGS, PTC, EDS, and the Ferengi Alliance.

The NASCAR-watching 3D CAD-using demographic is pretty huge, I’m told. If you count yourself among that legion, then rush right over to the Dassault Systemes web site and sign up for a web cast and learn how the Ray Evernham team gets extreme with PLM. Fifty lucky attendees get a cap. I get goose bumps just thinking about it.

 

Datakit of Santa Barbara, California and Lyon, France, is telling the world today that its CATIA V5 to Autodesk Inventor converter has received Autodesk Inventor 2008 Certification. The certification is made by Autodesk’s Inventor support staff.

Datakit says the new converter:

• Allows all 3D data including CATIA V5 Exact solids, to be transferred from native CATIA V5 files to Inventor up to 2008
• Converts geometry, attributes, assemblies and topology
• Reads CATPart as well as CATProducts files
• Filters data according to Entity Type and Visibility

The converter requires Inventor and Windows 2000 Sp2 /XP/Vista in order to work properly. It does not require a license of CATIA V5.

For more information: http://www.datakit.com/page_telechargements_plug.php?tele=8.

 

After several months of bad news for Dassault with regard to Airbus blaming its delayed production on its software, Dassault must have breathed a sigh of relief when it announced “a new era” in aerospace engineering, production planning and assembly simulation with the virtual roll out of the 787 Dreamliner. According to the December press release,”This first-ever virtual rollout, and the PLM technology underlying it, is not simply an animation of the completed airplane, but a virtual simulation and validation of the entire manufacturing process.”

The press release tends towards exuberant, but does impart some interesting ideas about the ability to create an entire aircraft in virtual space, prior to it being manufactured. Rather than just simulating the aircraft, Boeing is now using Dassault’s software to simulate the production lines and processes: “Such a digital manufacturing environment creates a communication “loop back” between 787 design and manufacturing engineers, no matter where they are, eliminating the risk of committing to a design change only to discover it cannot be manufactured, or that it requires costly changes to other components.”

The press release does not deliver any demos of this, but it would be cool to see quite how it works.