From June 22 to 23, 2010, I was invited to Paris to participate in the Global Industry Analyst Conference of Dassault Systemes (DS), one of the leading PLM vendors in the world. This article describes the experience about the meeting and my understanding of Dassault Systemes’ development strategy through this conference.

DS is headquartered in Velizy, France, a city near Paris. DS Campus contains four modern office buildings completed recently.

DS Campus

The analyst conference was held at the same time with the “Users and Developers Conference” of DS, which named SWYM, the short for “See What You Mean”. In the LOGO of the conference, there is a point above the letter Y that makes the LOGO look like “Swim”. It just can be used to describe my experience of attending this conference: swim in the 3D world.

The core elements of achieving the sustainable innovation

Compared to other mainstream PLM vendors, DS is focus more on the application of 3D technology. In my opinion, DS' vision is to use 3D technology in every industry. For example, there was a 3D simulated artificial heart exhibited in the conference, and the application of 3D technology in furniture design and online store was also introduced in the conference. DS believes that the key issues of achieving the sustainable innovation are as follows: share knowledge and know-how, think sustainable value chain, work with community, understand people & environment friendliness, and use 3D technology deeply and widely.

Dassault Systems is committed to achieving the 3D lifelike experience

The theme of the conference is “3D Lifelike Experience”, which means to give all the participants, including research personnel, customers, suppliers and partners the lifelike experience during the product innovation process. This is also the core strategy of DS in the next decade. Form the live demonstration, I feel that DS technology is really "cool".

DS raised a new concept: 'Product in life'. I think it means during the achieving sustainable innovation process, manufacturers need to use 3D technology to simulate the whole lifecycle of a product, including product structure and performance, design process, manufacturing process and maintenance process.

The conference focused on exhibiting the new technologies of V6R2011 launched by DS, as well as the innovations in aerospace, shipbuilding, consumer goods, apparel and construction industries solutions. Meanwhile, combined with Exalead, a search engine company that was just acquired by DS, the Search Based Application (SBA) was introduced in the conference. SBA means that through the application of a unified enterprise search engine, to show the structured data from all kinds of application systems in the way of fuzzy search, so that the search results can be displayed more easily and quickly. The core is to take out the data of the relational database based application systems through ERP / PLM / CRM and other systems’ adapters, and then to show the data in the way of search engine. I think that the acquisition of DS with Exalead means to provide a unified search engine on the V6 platform, so that all kinds of systems can be integrated more closely and collaborated, and can be combined with the search of 3D models, to reflect DS PLM2.0 concept better. At the same time, this product also brings a new product and service solution for DS which can be customized as various search engines to internal employees, customers, suppliers, and the public, for example, the search engine of car dealers, etc.

Another thesis of the conference is community collaboration. With the popularity of Facebook, Linkedin and other SNS portals, the community based collaboration has become one of the focuses of DS. In the conference, DS launched DraftSight, a free 2D CAD software which is based on Intellicad and can read and write DWG files easily. At the same time, the company also launched DraftSight online community. Users can create their own communities, invite friends to join, and also ask questions online. Besides, DS launched another online community for construction industry as well in the conference.

See what you mean, achieve what you hope, and provide the 3D lifelike experience of product innovation. This will be the core strategy in the next decade development of DS.

For the Chinese version of this article, please visit: http://blog.e-works.net.cn/6399/articles/89658.html

Translator-editor: Sophie Shi  ss@e-works.net.cn