Bernard Charles Unveils his Strategy for the Dassault Family of Technology

In this interview, Bernard Charles, President of Dassault Systemes, speaks about new events taking place in his company and unveils his product strategy. ENOVIA, is to become a PPR HUB, a hub associating products, processes and resources.

During the press conference you held in February, you told us of the Dassault Systemes performance 2000. It was outstanding, - 2.5 times market growth. What can you tell us now about the start of 2001?

The first quarter was on target with our forecasts. Our margins were eroded but this was due to our investment into research and development. We are keeping to the same targets for 2001, despite the positive slowing down of the American economy and the fact that IT budgets have been revised downwards.

During that quarter, we made an extremely important announcement concerning the partnership with MSC Software. The leading international supplier in the analysis market decided to put all its applications on the V5 platform. Together with LMS International (also based on the V5), it constitutes the biggest multi-physical simulation and analysis portfolio. MSC has become the IBM-Dassault Systèmes Business Partner and retails our range. It has acquired our partner, AES, in whom we had a shareholding for the purpose of reinforcing its sales and services structure in the USA. We also co-operate on the MSC analysis portal e-engineering.com.

In parallel, we have bought SRAC for its Cosmos software. One of the features of this software is that it integrates well with SolidWorks, Inventor, SolidEdge. Our aim is to become a supplier of analysis tools for all market sectors and to create, for analysis applications, a model similar to that of CATIA and SolidWorks for CAD.

The purchase of Cosmos constitutes the 14th acquisition by Dassault Systemes in three years. What was the reasoning behind these acquisitions? Were you not altogether happy with the SolidWorks purchase?

SolidWorks rose to number one world-wide in its field. We proved that it was possible to have an international management and distribution system that could dovetail with the one offered by IBM, and we structured the CAD market around product ranges. By providing a Process Centric CAD and a Design Centric CAD, we divided the market and destabilised PTC. This movement enabled us to concentrate on corporate systems, CATIA, ENOVIA, DELMIA and on entry systems such as SolidWorks which ranks above Autodesk for 3D.

Then there was our series of acquisitions in the field of numerically controlled machining. Our manufacturing portfolio is just as big and comprehensive as our design portfolio. We have devoted almost one billion dollars to designing the new generation architecture, something that none of our competitors have dared to do. This effort is now bearing fruit. DELMIA was created in June 2000, with its head office in Detroit and our competitor, Tecnomatix, is facing problems.

There were also acquisitions concerning the PDM. Having created ENOVIA in 1999 from nothing, we now have more customers than Metaphase after 15 years, with 2200 PDM customers throughout the world, including 1400 SMARTEAM customers. We have taken major technological leaps forward. The whole sector is in a constant state of flux. ENOVIA has been installed at Peugeot, Renault, Boeing, Honda, and BMW, but its portfolio is not complete. In effect, we didn't want to work with PDM, but with VPM. As far as the customers were concerned, PDM is a necessary evil, and the virtual mock-up, a strategic opportunity that allows a great many people, including sub-contractors, to work on a configured model at one and the same time. ENOVIA VPM is unique, differentiating factor, to which we have added technical data proper with the IBM Product Manager. We still have some way to go. We have set our sights very high. ENOVIA must become an associativity hub linking products, processes and resources, a PPR Hub. This dynamism, its finalisation, its completion, represents a long journey.

Software that is as heavy and complex as CATIA, data confidentiality requirements, are they compatible with ASP applications?

Our main concern is to use Internet technology to make the ASP intra-company, within the Intranet. Confidentiality challenges have led our customers to deal with inter-company co-operation as if it were an Extranet. From this viewpoint, the 3D Partstream from SolidWorks allows them to manage catalogues on-line or more simply to swap part models between principals and sub-contractors. It will also be working with CATIA in ASP mode. A CATIA customer, making electrical connectors for instance, will be able to create his Web site and to offer his customers 3D models of his products on-line. We also have 3D Expert. You are online and you want to know who is connected and knows the best way of producing five axes with CATIA 3D Expert consists of a community of users who have registered their skills. We shall be moving ASP towards Digital Manufacturing. ENOVIA must become an information portal, a content creation site, an online knowledge and training site. To those companies who seek this service, we offer the possibility of hosting their data by subcontracting this facility to IBM Global Services.

Dassault Systemes is twenty years old and it hasn't stopped improving its position within the industry. How do you explain this success? And how do you propose to keep moving forward?

We are just as likely to fail as our competitors. What we need is imagination, humility and the drive to achieve something that has meaning for our customers. It is hard to forecast what this industry's requirements will be in five years time. We need to invent new means and, sometimes, to run counter to leading trends. We decided to go for numerical modelling when everybody else was pushing assembly. We invented the generative when everybody else was opting for the parametric. We have built up an enormous portfolio of products to support industrial processes when everybody else was concentrating on functionality. We launched ENOVIA, model of the simultaneous and configured virtual product when all about us, they saw the future as being SGDT. We achieved a tremendous counter-trend success with the Process Centric and Design Centric concept when everybody else believed CAD to be a commodity.

Digital companies now aim to integrate products, processes and resources. The next technological leap will involve an architecture common to the management of the e-product, a PPR Hub, to create, optimise, provide support and maintain.

The PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) encompasses CAD. Product lifecycle management concerns all areas of business. ENOVIA has become the connection pipeline for this unique architecture. We have taken new risks where our competitors have decided not to. However, according to Merryl Lynch, CRM represents a 4.5 billion-dollar market, ERP between 9 and 10 billion dollars, Supply Chain Management, 4.5 billion dollars and PLM, 6.7 billion dollars. We are no longer a niche market. We have become a corporate solution. In buying all UGS and SDRC, EDS is showing analysts that PLM is a major issue.

What market sectors are you targeting with your 3D Commerce operations?

3D has become a decision-making aid. It allows the user to gain easy access to what has been designed as part of a project, to access it by touching the screen. 3D has become the component that allows the user to touch text information or knowledge just as if, at any time, you could access the physical mock-up of whatever you were thinking about. 3D CAD is a decision-making aid for the aeronautical industry. It is used for weight analyses, flight characteristics and for style. It can play the same role for the production system, tools, viewing the economic parameters of one's company as it is operating. In the future, product design will use morphings, constant shape changes, the 3D used to foster the mentality of working as a group. It is this section of the market we seek to address.

At the bottom of the 3D-requirement pyramid, we are into 3D e-Drawing, the Acrobat of 3D. Starting from our Planetcad experience, we shall be creating an e-Chronopost of 3D objects. Our operations extend from the sale of 3D components to competitors thanks to Spatial Technology, to PLM in its entirety.

CATIA has become a standard for the automotive and aeronautics industries. What other sectors will you be targeting?

CATIA is also the standard for the heavy engineering industry where it has more than 50 percent of the railway market and also in shipbuilding where it is number one. In general mechanical engineering, SolidWorks and CATIA are the leaders. Our current target is mecatronic engineering with clients such as Nokia or Ericsson. Thanks to Frank O. Gehry, who is a friend of ours, we are also present in the field of innovative architecture.

Interview conducted by Mireille Boris.
Bernard Charles will be presenting details of the above at the COE Fall 2001 conference.

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