It was quite a juxtaposition going from the soft Texas drawl of former Texas Aggie Jeff Ray to the heavy French accent of Bertrand Sicot and I am sure many will infer that this shift indicates the further "Dassification" of SolidWorks. Last year's SolidWorks World was the first time that the Dassault CEO, Bernard Charles appeared at the event. He certainly appeared very comfortable in front of the SolidWorks user community this year as he shared his vision for the future of 3D design with a demonstration of Dassault's immersive virtualization technology. What does the leadership change mean for SolidWorks users and what are some of the indicators about the future for product data management (PDM) and product lifecycle management (PLM) as Dassault more aggressively attempts to unify their platform? This article will explore some of the activities at this year's SolidWorks World and what they portend for the future.

One interesting fact about the new leadership change that was emphasized is that Bertrand Sicot is a long time SolidWorks employee. He was one of the first SolidWorks employees in Europe and has been with the company since 1997. I am sure this point was emphasized to try and reassure SolidWorks users that his nationality is merely a coincidence and has no bearing on his elevation to the leadership position. Certainly his background as a long time SolidWorks employee and his mechanical engineering degree should offer some comfort that SolidWorks is not completely abandoning its origins but it seems apparent that Jeff Ray didn't just wake up one morning and say "gosh I would really like to work for Dassault instead of SolidWorks I wonder if Bertrand is up for taking over." This is obviously an incremental move to further assimilate SolidWorks into the larger Dassault organization but surely this should come as no surprise to anyone. It is also obvious that Dassault highly values the SolidWorks brand and will move cautiously to minimize any apprehensions in the user community.

The same themes of being a customer driven company were emphasized and both Dassault and SolidWorks continue to be very much oriented toward improving the technology and offering their customer base more robust solutions. Sicot emphasized SolidWorks continued commitment to R&D but no one talked about "the death of SolidWorks". Charles was very deliberate in saying that SolidWorks will never abandon its desktop platform for both CAD and PLM. He also added that the vision was to expand the footprint of SolidWorks beyond the engineering department which most assuredly means bringing more Dassault based products into the SolidWorks environment. A recent example of this would be DraftSight, a free 2D based drafting tool developed by Dassault that is being distributed through SolidWorks and other Dassault entities. Currently, they are reporting over 300,000 downloads of the product.

Another interesting occurrence is that Dassault products are more visible this year in the Partner pavilion and in the presentations. I sat in on a presentation about integrating SolidWorks Enterprise PDM (EPDM) with Enovia. Interestingly, the presenter was from a SolidWork's partner and his thoughts on the future of data management for SolidWorks was that Dassault would continue to try and improve the data management capabilities within Enovia to reduce the need for maintaining separate environments for CAD and PLM. This obviously will take a while and I am sure there will always be a stand-alone option for managing SolidWorks data but it definitely seems like Dassault is moving closer to bringing Enovia to the SolidWorks channel. Comments from users in the room indicated that EPDM was far more functional for managing SolidWorks than the adaptor within Enovia.

The growth of EPDM is fairly obvious at the show as well. Recently, SolidWorks created a new category for partners specifically based on EPDM. The sessions I attended involving EPDM were very well attended and there were far more EPDM oriented presentations this year. Comments from users indicate the EPDM is not without flaws but overall acceptance of EPDM is growing and more and more SolidWorks customers are moving off of the old PDMWorks platform onto EPDM. There were discussions about expanding EPDM's capabilities to better serve the engineering environment including expanding multi CAD support and improving connectivity to external products and workflow capabilities. It is very obvious that the platform will be around a while and that it is unlikely Dassault will be attempting to replace it with a watered down version of Enovia at least for the foreseeable future.

Overall, the show definitely had a more French feel this year and it seemed we are closer to Paris, France than Paris Texas with SolidWorks but Dassault is very sensitive to the market and does not want to jeopardize the relationship SolidWorks has with its customers and partners. We will continue to see Dassault attempt to leverage the market to bring more of their technology into this space and to elevate customers into the Dassault product family but I seriously doubt this will impact the capability or usability of SolidWorks products and will most likely have a positive effect on the breadth of technology offered by SolidWorks and their partners.