“3D Experience is the next horizon after PLM”

Bernard Charles, President & CEO, Dassault Systemes, talked to Prashant L Rao about the company’s vision for 3D Experience that brings together Cloud computing, social networking, virtual reality and search-based analytics

Tell us about 3D Experience and what it means for Dassault.
Our announcement of 3D Experience on February 9th is every bit as important as our announcement of PLM was back in June 1999. Back then, it was all about CAD/CAM and a little bit of PDM. Gartner and others were talking about Collaborative Product Commerce. We argued that that, after digital mockups, it was time for PLM. By 2001, everyone became convinced that there was something in what we were saying. There was still confusion between PLM and PDM. Today, when you look back, PLM has been adopted by many industry sectors. People know the difference between PDM, which is for managing data and PLM, which manages the lifecycle simulation of what you do.

An iPhone is a winner because it provides a great experience that’s about more than a product. It’s about how you take advantage of any physical good and its contribution to how you run your business or conduct your life. 3D Experience is about doing that. It’s the next horizon after PLM. The fundamental value is about how we can offer our customers the ability to put the consumer or their customers at the center of the product creation pipeline in a holistic sense including design, engineering, simulation and production.

How do social networking and Cloud computing tie into this?
You need to facilitate collaboration, which is going to be social. That’s why we have built 3DSWYM. Today it’s difficult for people to share ideas and make it easy for people to participate. The 3D side is about SolidWorks and CATIA. It’s also about 3D virtual reality that allows you to create incredible content on the Cloud. The crowd sourcing of ideas is coming. For now, people putting up content get the benefit of a free catalog. Prospective buyers can use their iPhones to take a photograph of the environment in which they will use the product and make use of Augmented Reality. A customer in Germany has created its own secure community to publish 3D instruction sets; the guy on the shop floor uses an iPad to get the instructions.

Today, people can buy the Cloud versions of our products from our online store. We also offer Cloud services that allow existing customers using our products such as n!Fuze or n!Volve to collaborate. We have our own Cloud but, for reasons of elasticity, we have signed up with AWS and will also probably have alliances with Microsoft Azure and IBM.

Our platforms are based on open source but what’s unique is that we have done the PLM of our Cloud so that we can look at many Clouds as one across the globe.

If you are based in India and traveling to Europe for business, we can provision the resources in Europe for the duration of your trip.

Can you give us some examples of how your customers are using Cloud computing?
We have industry-specific Clouds. We have signed an agreement with European Aerospace to create a Cloud called BoostAeroSpace. This is a highly secure private Cloud, which is usable by an identified list of companies that are in this sector. Even if those companies are competing, they know that they are in a secure environment that’s governed by European laws for things like IP, from an auditing standpoint etc. and they know that the data resides in Europe. This concept is taking off very well.

We have another category of Cloud services that are related to providing specific content. There is an initiative in Europe called Eurosyslib, a consortium of European universities that have agreed to use our system. If you are a provider of smart equipment, you can publish the behavior of your equipment online in a Modelica format.

Then there are open communities like 40Fires.org where they are using 3DSWYM and people are publishing specifications for new electric vehicles.

What’s unique about your V6 platform?
What’s unique about this platform is that it is the only platform that integrates all the aspects of 3D, VR, search-based analytics and social. It brings together all of our solutions. Earlier business users couldn’t play with CAD/PDM. Now they can view a model in a Web browser and play with it.

V6 connects requirements with function with logic with physics. No other system on the planet can do that today.

The V6 architecture is the same whether you use it on premise, in a private Cloud or on the public Cloud. There aren’t many companies that provide a consistent architecture across these three areas.

For mobility, we have a V6 kernel running on the iPad. You can use Natural Sketch on the tablet and it is a native application. Everything that we do is going to be on the V6 platform which makes things easy from an interoperability point-of-view.

Tell us about the rationale behind your acquisition of Netvibes?
Netvibes is free and it has been downloaded over a hundred million times. It lets you easily create dashboards about a particular company in real time. We want to use this technology so that it can be used within a company to process any PDM, CRM or ERP data stream to build dynamic dashboards.

What are your plans for India?
Our focus in India is with regard to education. With the Cloud, it’s going to be easier. We are looking at industry sectors such as aerospace, energy and smart cities in the country.

We will have the 3D Experience Forum in India in November.

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