Saturday, August 09, 2008

Is Dassault Systemes getting their house in order?

To me, Dassault Systemes always seemed to be this massive French company that owns a bunch of technology companies, but always just sat back and let these companies run as separate entities. Always known as having CATIA as the heart of their PLM inititative. They began a campaign of acquiring technologies about 10 years ago. Here is a quick list of the highlights.

SolidWorks (1997)
SRAC (2001)
ABAQUS (2005)
Matrix One (2006)
ICEM Surf (2007)
Engineous (2008)

DS has always done a great job acquiring some of the most successful companies. What they have also done well is just leave these companies to operate as a bunch of small profitable, successful entities. The CATIA/SolidWorks combination is a great example of two extremes that serve different markets and were allowed to continue doing what they do.

Small calculated decisions seemed to be made over the years. Years ago, there was a ton of buzz about the operability of CATIA and SolidWorks. But relatively nothing changed. Then a slight change to the SolidWorks logo that added a little "DS". People acted as "this was it, now things will change." Again, hardly any change.

But things seem to be changing recently. DS has recently re-branded ABAQUS to Simulia. But a bolder move is the buzz that SolidWorks is now, Dassault Systemes SolidWorks Corporation. The Cosmos line is now SolidWorks Simulation. May seem like simple name changing, but I think it falls in line with the industry, in general.

Only a few years ago, there were numerous companies in the MCAD and FEA space, these numbers are dwindling due to acquisitions etc. In the not so distant future, there will only be a "few" monster companies that are able to offer us (the consumer) "everything". Sounds relatively familiar.

Circa, 1995, the MCAD world seemed pretty set in stone in the pre "PLM" days. You had PTC, UGS, SDRC and DS battling it out in the 3D space. Autodesk was the master of its own domain in the 2D world. In the FEA market there was MSC, HKS and ANSYS along with some of the other players like SRAC and SDRC. But for the most part, this was the playing field. Then SolidWorks and others blasting into the market and simply changed the way we look at things. This was in the days when a 3D MCAD investment was on the order of ~$40k ($20k for software and $20k for a computer to run it).

Point of my rant here is that I love the fact that these massive companies are becoming powerhouses in their own right. No doubt there will be some serious technology leaps that are made. No doubt a serious challenge for them is to manage all of the technology and not forget their biggest asset, us, the users. Look at our friends Microsoft. More importantly, I am excited to see what disruptive technology will come along to again change the market upside down.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree with you mostly, but the other things to consider is the fact that there are many, many more tools out there in the analysis world than just those from MSC, HKS, Ansys (and some others you listed). Sure, these guys are the big names, but if you look closely at big organizations, the amount of overall analysis that these "names" make up is still quite small. There is a strong need, and I suggest it will continue, for niche codes both from both commercial and inhouse sources. (In addition, FEA makes up only a small portion of the total "analysis" that is performed)

The industry consolidation that has occurred (HKS is a good example) is the result of interest from the finance guys on the boards of these companies - motivated by the customer base that is acquired, rather than the technology per se.

Derrek Cooper said...

Good point, for sure. I find that the in-house stuff is not quite as popular to consider doing today as it was 20 years ago.

Meaning, I think it is a mind-set to look outside for software development and stay lean and mean on the design side.

Of course, the larger the organization, the less this is true. But for small to medium size businesses I find this to be true.