I had the chance to talk with ... Dassault Systems this week about their SOA strategy and their soon-to-be-released V6 architecture and product suite . I have to be honest, this was the second time I talked to them about this and I am getting a much better impression. Maybe I am jaded by seeing too many vendor presentations that I know "stretch" reality, reminding me of one vendor that in the "B2B" days was accused of having a "P2P" problem - converting "PowerPoint" to "Product." V6 is not yet released, but based on what I can see this is not a case where there is a lot of presentation material without substance. If anything, the presentations don't do the fundamental nature of the changes enough justice.

What do they Do?
Dassault Systems is one of the top, if not the top depending on how you measure, PLM vendors. They have a very broad footprint of solutions ranging from CAD (Catia, also owning SolidWorks) to Simulation (Simulia) to core PLM (Enovia) to some very other interesting things in the 3D world (Spatial, 3DVia, etc.). I won't go into detail here, but leave it with the fact that they are a very major player in PLM, and most of you have probably heard of them already. But to be complete (although brief), that is DS.

What are they Doing with V6?
It wasn't that long ago that all of the Dassault "brands" came out on different release schedules. Delmia, Catia and Enovia could be released on different time schedules. To be honest, MatrixOne and Simulia (formerly Abacus) weren't even owned by Dassault a couple of years back. What started as harmonized release calendars is now turning into a harmonized solution. According to everything I can tell, there will be a large amount of consolidation and commonality in the base architecture of the solutions. For Enovia (now consisting of traditional VPM, MatrixOne, and SmarTeam) it will include common business processes and a data model that contains a superset of the information from these solutions. Existing customers will be moving toward a single Enovia solution, but with the promise of having their existing capabilities at hand in the final product. A huge undertaking, but also a huge step forward as the architecture is both common and SOA based.

The key takeaway from my conversation is that they are not simply paying lip service (or PowerPoint service) to a next generation, this is a serious development effort. They are rearchitecting all of their solutions (including high-end CAD system Catia) to run in a web services mode. Dassault is clearly investing in the architecture of their products in order to remain competitive as a leader in the extended PLM market.

Final Caveat
V6 is not released yet, so I don't have a roomful (or even a handful) of customers to validate the direction and the delivery of the solution, it will be interesting to see how the solutions will be received and adopted by the customer base.

So that's what I hear from Dassault, I hope you found it useful. What do you think? What else should I have asked them?