ORLANDO — Emphasizing a theme of helping companies “emerge with advantage” from the recession, product lifecycle management software provider Dassault Systèmes this week brought together its PLM-focused brands in one customer conference here, a first for the vendor.
Bernard Charles, Dassault’s CEO, described the brand unification, which includes CATIA, DELMIA, ENOVIA, SIMULIA, and 3DVIA, as part and parcel of a strategy that dates back several years and includes Dassault’s acquisitions of MatrixOne and Abaqus, among others. (The SolidWorks CAD brand remains the one stand-alone.) The unification will help the company deliver on its vision of PLM 2.0, Charles said, a concept that he and other Dassault executives defined, in part, as a representation of real-life conditions in a virtual world.
“Our vision of the future is about lifelike experiences,” Charles said, adding that future Dassault products will emphasize this tenet. “It has to behave like real life, and it has to comply with real life,” he said of simulation technology.
The goals of this new wave of PLM include global collaboration among product development teams and others, lifelike simulation experiences for designers and customers, a single PLM platform for intellectual property management, online creation and collaboration, ready-to-use business processes for product development, and a lower cost of software ownership, according to Dassault.
One cog in that wheel is DSX-Eco Pulse, a conversation-centric application announced at the conference as part of the company’s social innovation theme. The online collaboration tool has the familiar look of social networking sites, such as Facebook, and is aimed at connecting experts around the world, creating “a new human proximity,” as Charles put it in a press briefing.
“The speed of capitalizing on knowledge and sharing it across the world is astonishing,” he said. The Pulse application and others to come will give product and production engineers a chance to collaborate in a more intuitive way, he said, and the young workers who will be joining their ranks in the coming years will want business tools similar to Facebook and LinkedIn. “I don’t think they’re happy with SharePoint,” he said, referring to Microsoft’s collaboration technology.
The social innovation trend represents a marked shift for the France-based company, something Charles readily admitted.
“A year ago, I would have described [social networking] as an add-on,” he told reporters and analysts. “But now I’m telling you it’s at the core of what we do. … It’s becoming a key element of how people interact.”
Charles and other executives also pointed to SaaS applications and cloud computing as trends that are reshaping the company. Dassault’s V6 platform, rolled out earlier this year, offers manufacturers an online software experience, and the company will pursue application offerings on a multi-tenant model, in private clouds, and through on-premise, managed deployments. Charles said Dassault will manage the first brand of offering on its own, relying on longtime partner IBM for help in delivering the other two.
Dassault now has a footprint in 11 sectors, having expanded its product lines beyond traditional areas of expertise such as automotive and aerospace and into markets such as life sciences, apparel, industrial equipment, and consumer product goods.