Dassault Systemes' 2006 Analyst and Media Event was held in Paris on June 14 & 15.? Bernard Charles, CEO kicked off the event with an update, overview, and visionary perspective of Dassault Systemes and the PLM market.? Within a very strong PLM market segment, Dassault Systemes reported 1st Quarter 2006 revenues of year-over-year growth at 30 percent.? Within the context of this continued strong growth, Charles pointed out that Dassault Systemes did not anticipate being taken over any time soon (they own 52 percent of their stock), and will continue to maintain vision and thought leadership in the PLM market, while continuing to invest heavily in R&D and Human Resources.

Charles addressed Dassault's strategic partnerships, specifically their long-time partnership and alliance with IBM.? He was quick to point out that their partnership with IBM has been evolving and changing as the scope and market dynamics of the PLM segment evolved and matured.? Amid some speculation that the DS/IBM partnership was beginning to show some cracks with age, Charles pointed out that their relationship with IBM was as strong as ever, just changing with the business environment in the PLM market.?

The partnership was forged in the beginning with IBM's mainframe environment providing the hardware platform for CATIA.? As Dassault Systemes and IBM migrated to UNIX and a client/server architecture, and ultimately a Windows environment, the relationship has remained intact.? Going forward, the partnership will expand in consulting and middleware collaboration.? The channels will become leaner while business between the two will be based on the best revenue split for PLM solutions and services.? Charles pointed out that there will be more online services while adapting to new customer demands.? IBM will be able to leverage the collaborative global requirements of PLM customers with their expansive middleware offerings.? Charles added that the PLM market is transitioning to volume sales from one-to-one relationships with customers.? Named accounts will continue to constitute strong business, but more PLM offerings will be driven by selective partnerships with best of breed solution providers.

Charles's vision of the end-to-end 3D experience was substantiated by Dassault Systemes' current set of PLM solutions across the product lifecycle.? Across the V5 virtual environment, including Solidworks for 3D MCAD, CATIA for product design, SIMULIA for realistic product testing, DELMIA for Digital Mfg, and ENOVIA/SmarTeam/MatrixOne for PDM and Business Process Mgmt, the Dassault Systemes PLM solution set covers the end-to-end 3D experience.? Of particular interest was the Dassault Systemes expanded view of PLM through their Virtualization of Industries concept.? Starting at the engineering concept/design level, a single design engineer (x1) creates the product model, which in turn collaborates with other design, manufacturing, systems engineers, and other contributors (x10) to implement the design/build process.? This collaborative expansion of knowledge then continues beyond the enterprise to the consumer level (x100) through the 3D virtual experience and the Dassault Systemes technology that enables it.

Additionally, the announcement of the Dassault Systemes software strategy for 2006 was particularly significant from the perspective of expanding the V5 collaborative and open environment.? V5 SOA will provide a new level of openness and interoperability across all of the V5 environment and the Dassault Systemes ecosystem, as well as enabling the Dassault Systemes vision of the end-to-end 3D experience with all products, processes, and resources interacting and interfacing in collaborative environment.

Joel Lemke, CEO of the ENOVIA business unit, presented a view of the "new" ENOVIA in light of the recent acquisition of MatrixOne.? This was much anticipated by the analyst community overall and was intended to demonstrate ENOVIA as a single global brand to address the PDM market.? What was rolled out was ENOVIA VPLM (Virtual PLM), ENOVIA MatrixOne, and ENOVIA SmarTeam.? This combines ENOVIA and SmarTeam with a customer base of over 7,000 with MatixOne's 850 customers into a consolidated set of product lines under the ENOVIA brand.?

ENOVIA VPLM provides a global 3D collaborative environment that ties together V5 digital mockup (DMU), in-context engineering (VPM), their product, process, and resources (PPR) lifecycle, and V5 CES (sourcing).? SmarTeam will focus on the PDM requirements of the SMB market and engineering organizations of larger companies.? ENOVIA MatrixOne will address the collaborative product development business process management sector.? There will an emphasis on specific industrial vertical solutions.? Lemke sees growth opportunities in several industrial verticals including Electronics and High Tech, Medical Devices, Footwear & Apparel, and CPG.

Of particular interest was the roll out of ENOVIA 3D Live, a real-time virtual collaborative tool that allows complete collaboration of the product design (CATIA), process design (DELMIA), with ENOVIA and SmarTeam.? The user interacts with the 3D Live platform through a 3D virtual "compass" that allows navigation between all of the systems within the V5 environment.? Once the user determines where they want to go, it is possible to drill down to specific product models, product data, BOMs, part trees, etc.? In order to extend 3D Live to the consumer level, 3DVIA is used to allow anyone external to the V5 environment to access PRR information.? ENOVIA 3D Live will leverage the V5 SOA architecture and will the first significant use of the V5 SOA user experience strategy.? This all fits in with DS's vision to use 3D and virtual collaboration as a core strategy going forward.

John McEleney, CEO of the SolidWorks business unit, presented an overview of Dassault Systemes' 3D CAD business and the segment overall.? Solidworks represents the key component of Dassault Systemes' SMB focus on that market, along with SmarTeam, PDMWorks Enterprise for 10 or more users and multiple locations, PDMWorks for less than 10 users and a single location, and Solidworks Explorer for 1-2 users.? The emphasis for Solidworks is the user experience allowing the user to focus on product design, not the design tool.? Solidworks continues to reach out to the 2D designer and the 2D to 3D conversion market.? One approach is their DWG series that allows complete interoperability with AutoCAD's DWG file format.

Integrating product simulation solutions into the V5 environment continues to be a significant focus for Dassault Systemes with continued development of the SIMULIA simulation platform for realistic product simulation and testing.? Mark Goldstein, CEO of SIMULIA and previous CEO of ABAQUS, the simulation provider acquired by Dassault Systemes in 2005, presented an overview of SIMULIA and the engineering simulation sector.? With the acquisition of ABAQUS and other consolidation in this market, Dassault Systemes ranks third behind MSC and ANSYS.? Dassault Systemes' strategy is to tightly integrate CATIA V5 Analysis and ABAQUS for V5 in a physical simulation platform that supports simulation collaboration across the V5 environment.

Dassault Systemes showcased their partnerships with IBM and Microsoft within the context of V5 SOA.? IBM and Microsoft presented their respective strategies for partnering with Dassault Systemes in terms of SOA, platforms, and middleware.? From Dassault Systemes' perspective, the client side (OS) will be MS Vista, XP, and Linux (Red Hat, Suse), the server side will be Vista Server, BizTalk Server, SharePoint Portal Server, WebSphere Portal Server, and Linux Servers.? Database management will be SQL Server 2005, DB2, and Oracle.

The Microsoft solution set partnership will include MS Web Service Foundation (.NET), Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF), and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) as a component of Vista, and Office 2006 for collaboration, portals, and content management.? IBM's view of SOA is business centric with SOA governance as a critical element.? Using WebSphere, Lotus, Tivoli, and their entire suite of business process integration tools, IBM will connect people, information, and processes across their SOA architecture.? It appears that Dassault Systemes' strategy and direction to define V5 in SOA was influenced significantly by IBM.

Peter Schmitt, VP of Marketing and Bus. Dev. for DELMIA, presented Dassault Systemes' PLM approach to Digital Manufacturing.? Schmitt presented the value proposition for Digital Manufacturing from the perspective of process innovation, faster time to product launch and market, reduction of production errors and change, and total cost reduction of the production process.? DELMIA represents a manufacturing process solution set that integrates product design with creation, planning, simulation, and validation of the production processes.? DELMIA incorporates and implements Dassault Systemes' strategy of integrating product, process, and resources (PPR) within the V5 environment.? DELMIA provides tools for process and production planning, factory layout and concept planning, workstation & production line simulation and validation, and generation of control code from production simulation with the DELMIA Automation Platform.? DELMIA is also partnering with MES solution providers such as Visiprise, Intercim, and iBaseT for shop floor production management and execution that provide built records to validate as-designed information for both product and production processes.

Bernard Duplat, CTO of Virtools, introduced the Virtools 3D real life simulation product set.? Virtools represents a set of tools that enables the user to create a virtual 3D world and then place the product model in this virtual world in so that the user can experience total interaction with the product.? This would also represent the life experience portion of the end-to-end 3D experience for the consumer within the overall Dassault Systemes vision of access to 3D across the entire lifecycle.? This 3D is targeted to new users across new markets such as sales and marketing, advertising, Web marketing, product usage, product maintenance and support, and learning and training.

Overall, Dassault Systemes provided a comprehensive overview of their new products, architectures, and strategies for the PLM Analysts in attendance.? In terms of take away, there were several significant announcements and introductions, including the V5 SOA strategy, the emerging ENOVIA brand products and solution and integration of MatrixOne, the ENOVIA 3D Live platform, and the extension of the 3D experience to new markets through Virtools.? It is clear that Dassault Systemes continues as thought leaders and innovators in the PLM sector with the vision and the technology to enable it.??