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 PDF On November 8 through 10, Dassault Systèmes held the Dassault Systèmes Customer Conference (DSCC 2011) at Caesars Palace, on the Strip in Las Vegas, NV. The glamour and glitz outside were more than matched by the high wattage firepower on the main stage. Most of the top Dassault Systèmes executives were front and center, cheering on their leading customers like Johnson & Johnson, Bell Helicopter, and Benetton. The wide range of industries represented by these customers is indicative of the shift at the company over the last several years to broaden their traditional strengths in “planes, trains, and automobiles,” to successfully compete in apparel, consumer packaged goods, and even services applications of PLM. As usual, Bernard Charlès revved up the crowd with a passionate speech about his company, and how they plan to move forward over the coming decades. According to Mr. Charlès, customer adoption of their Version 6 platform is

 PDF On November 9, 2011, Siemens PLM Software announced their acquisition of Vistagy, Inc., known mainly as a leading provider of composites design and manufacturing solutions. Vistagy has been a long-time partner of Siemens PLM Software, providing solutions to enhance the ability of their NX offering, to help customers more effectively design and manufacture composite structures. Vistagy also offers engineering services, and has expanded their product line in recent years to include other specialty applications. Most notably used in aerospace applications, composites use is spreading across many industries, and thus, composite design solutions are growing in importance. Automotive manufacturers are replacing steel and aluminum components with composites to reduce weight; in some cases simultaneously increasing strength and rigidity. In the broad consumer market, many tennis players rely on composite rackets to approximate the strokes and power of their favorite tennis players. But it is in aerospace that composites have made some things

 PDF Autodesk Analyst Day 2011 Autodesk held their 2011 Analyst Day at the Artists for Humanity (AFH) facility in South Boston on October 20. Nearly thirty analysts were invited to hear a company update by Autodesk executives. The setting was appropriate, as the AFH, the first LEED Platinum Certified building in Boston, was designed using Autodesk solutions. Leading off the day was Autodesk’s CEO Carl Bass, who spoke about “Autodesk Today and Tomorrow.” Some of his talk echoed their Investor Day presentation in June. Mr. Bass presented a chart depicting Autodesk’s customers by company size. Enterprise customers are at the tip of a very steep spike, but they are Autodesk’s fastest growing segment, now making up 30 percent of revenues. Even with their financial success and increasing work with large customers, Bass said that for years Autodesk has struggled to be known as more than the “AutoCAD company.” But Mr. Bass claims that he

Back in the 70s when I was much more of a baseball fan, the Cincinnati Reds were the Big Red Machine. Powerful. Efficient. Talented. Complete. Why would I use this as a title for a blog post? Because in our role as strategic consultants to end user companies (60-70% of CIMdata’s revenues in most years), we often help them to define their PLM strategies, develop requirements, and select and implement PLM-enabling solutions. In this role, we have front row seats to solution benchmarks, where the leading PLM solution suppliers are asked to show how their solutions can meet a set of customer-defined scenarios. And this is why I chose the Hall of Fame catcher for my title. All of these companies should be like the Big Red Machine. Efficient. Talented. Complete. They should hit these meatballs out of the park. Why do we believe this? Because in our analyst role, we work

 PDF The industrial equipment (IE) market is large and varied, ranging from fabricated metal components and sub-assemblies to manufacturing equipment that convey, assemble, or produce products, and mobile machinery like farming or construction equipment. IE companies have different business models, development and production requirements e.g., build to order (BTO). In order to be successful, IE companies must respond to changes in market needs, new technologies, ever-increasing product complexity, expanding end customer and regulatory requirements, and relentless cost pressures. Products may have lifecycles measured in years or decades, which require ongoing service, and may be significantly modified or upgraded over time. To successfully meet changing global market requirements, IE companies need PLM solutions and technologies that enable them to produce innovative, customized products faster, achieving both accuracy and profitability. IE Company Business Challenges Customers of IE purchase that equipment based on performance specifications tied to return on investment (ROI) rather than on features and

 PDF The choice of the company’s new Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system has been made and the team of decision makers celebrates the challenging selection effort. But now the real work begins—planning and executing the migration of data from the current legacy systems to the new target PLM platform. A company’s existing data contains a significant portion of their intellectual property (IP) and therefore the company’s competitive advantage and value. The success of the new system depends heavily upon an effective migration of existing data in an intelligent, quality, and timely manner. This scenario is repeated in varying degrees across the globe and in every industry vertical. With the rapid pace of improving technology, competitive pressures drive many companies to continually evaluate their PLM solutions and undertake improvements. The decision may be driven by the recognition that their current legacy solution, or more often their maintenance of multiple legacy systems, has grown

 PDF On September 7-8, Siemens PLM Software held their annual analyst event in Boston, Massachusetts. Approximately 150 people—including analysts, journalists, bloggers, and representatives from across Siemens PLM Software and other Siemens businesses - convened to listen to Siemens PLM’s executives and customers provide a business, technology, and strategy update. According to those Siemens PLM executives, the state of the business is strong. While Siemens AG does not report on business unit revenues, Tony Affuso, Chairman and CEO of Siemens PLM, cited the strong 2011 results of their main competitors, Dassault Systems and PTC, and claimed Siemens PLM is exceeding them. Going further, he referred to the high win rates in competitive selections against those firms and listed many specific customers who are replacing their current PLM solutions with Siemens PLM offerings. In a consistent message with years past, Affuso claimed that their focus on openness and their mantra “we never let a

When speaking about design processes using Computer-Aided Design (CAD) solutions, people often refer to “engineering intent.” Not being a CAD guy (and not playing one on TV either), I would ask colleagues about exactly what this meant. Most of the conversations left me confused, because they would talk about history trees, and the problems with one person having to make changes to another’s design and having to unravel the steps that were used to transform shapes into the desired part or assembly. This left me believing that a lot of what people referred to as engineering intent was really “geometric intent,” the steps that a person executed using their CAD solution of choice to create the desired result. As a lapsed mathematician, I knew that there were many geometric ways to skin the cat, if you will. You can get to a desired geometric end result using different transformations. How you

 PDF On June 26 and 27, Dassault Systèmes held their annual Industry Analyst event in La Defense, the business district just across the Seine from Paris. As has been past practice, it was held in conjunction with a Dassault Systèmes partner event, the Application Innovation Summit (AIS). The renaming of this event is significant in and of itself, as it illustrates Dassault Systèmes’ rededication to growing its partner base for the V6 architecture. CAA2, the second generation of their successful CAA partnership program, finally provides the tools necessary for partners to build applications tightly integrated with the V6 platform. The breadth of CAA applications made the V5 platform a powerful competitive force in the high-end CAD market, and with this event Dassault Systèmes is putting that same muscle behind V6. Scheduling issues put Bernard Charlès on stage for the day two keynote, but he did not disappoint. He stated that there are

 PDF June 12, 2011, PTC opened their US end user event, PlanetPTC Live 2011, at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas in front of over two thousand attendees and announced that a “new era of product design” had begun with the release of their Creo 1.0 applications. Marketing bravado aside, PTC has aggressively re-emerged into the product design and development arena. Brian Shepherd, Executive Vice-President of Product Development, detailed Creo 1.0, the major release of Windchill 10.0, and the acquisition of MKS, a leading supplier of solutions for managing embedded software development. All combine to draw renewed attention to PTC’s position in the broad PLM industry. Real immediate impact is felt, however, with the delivery of Creo. Over the past twenty-five years, PTC fundamentally changed the MCAD industry when they introduced parametric solid modeling in their flagship product, Pro/ENGINEER. Now, PTC hopes to re-energize their fortunes with a combination of both parametric