I spent my last two days attending Dassault System Customer Conference (DSCC 2011) in Las Vegas. It will take some time to digest and re-think everything I learned. Today, I wanted to provide you some of my initial thoughts about what I’ve seen and heard.
PLM Vision: Lifelike + Industry Value
Dassault is embarking into the 4th generation (wave) of PLM vision. The name of the “game” is lifelike experience. Bernard Charles was very expressive when explained about lifelike experience. In a nutshell, you can think about lifelike experience as a move towards the PLM in a form of a video game. However, you will “play with a real stuff”.
I found this vision cool and interesting. It will take a time, in my view, until customers are able to adopt it. Another part of the vision is “a holistic industry value creation platform” presented by a new EVP of industry solutions – Monica Menghini.
Shift from Best Practices to Innovation
Dassault was talking a lot about innovation. In my view, DS step towards innovation is an interesting one. It presented as a game changer and justification of PLM expenses. In the past, PLM companies was very focused on so-called “best practices”. I always had a mixed feeling about “best practices” story. So, finally, DS decided to move out of “best practices” story and approach “innovation. Invited blogger (Stephen Shapiro) was talking about Innovation and Best Practices.
Transition to V6
V6 is here. This is a very strong message you can get listening to all DS presentations. I hope everybody understand, it is still too early to talk about massive V6 adoption, Dassault is carefully discussing this strategic move and all customers and companies that are involved into V6 adoption and migration. The migration story is also important to DS and you can see some investment that was made in this domain.
ENOVIA is a power behind everything
Dassault is presenting ENOVIA V6 as a big deal, the only one “unique online cloud platform”. In the first day, Bernard Charles shared the information about $2B investment into R&D effort that “converge” with all technologies under a single platform available on the cloud. Later today, in a conversation I had with Enovia CEO (Andy Kalambi), he mentioned Enovia a true “multi-tenant” cloud solution. The following slide can give a sense of how Enovia positioned among other DS products.
3DSwYm and Social Innovation
Dassault is speaking a social language too. It is not surprising these days. Earlier today, I had a chance to watch a detailed presentation of 3DSwYm environment and talk to people involved into this product creation. I have to say, in the beginning, 3DSwYm story was very confusing to me. The biggest question I had was “what are main differences between 3DSwYm and other tools such as Facebook, Google+, Chatter, etc. I think, I finally found the answer on this question. To me, 3DSwYm is a logical continuation of Windows File Explorer (don’t jump on me – I will explain :)). Look on the picture of 3DSwYm environment below.
In a nutshell, I can say – 3DSwYm is a content delivery environment, which has a capability to deliver rich (3D and PLM) content and the ability to be social and engage people with communication. Time ago, when computers just started, “file explorer” played the role of content delivery, since everything was about folders and files (local and networked).
What is my conclusion? Dassault didn’t make any big announcements this year. Nevertheless, I found the overall conference content relatively solid. For my taste, presentations (especially general session) were too high level. However, it was compensated by networking and communicating with other people. The biggest DS challenge remains V6 adoption and finding a way for companies to optimize their transition in this platform. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
