SolidWorks 2009 Barcelona press event: Bernard Charles

While I have some difficulty understanding his frenglish, as I’m sure he would have difficulty understanding mine, Bernard Charles, the CEO of Dassault Systemmes, had some interesting nuggets.

Bernard made the case for SolidWorks as a Dassault Systemmes brand. He wants to make a “love mark”, which may just translate poorly. The point was that they want people to really love SolidWorks the way that they love Catia or some of the other DS products.

Mr. Charles positioned the acquisition of SolidWorks by DS as in the interests of the customer, if for nothing else to fend off the acquisition on the open market by a company like PTC. The backdrop for this was that back in 1997, SolidWorks was considering an IPO instead of selling out to a larger organization.

Interestingly, Bernard also reinforced the gaming industry as a benchmark for CAD, or at least SolidWorks. This is most interesting in the light of this, and the whole OpenGL and DirectX. One of the other bloggers quoted Fielder Hiss with a rather non-committal answer that could be taken either way.

Jeff Ray: “…where you start to believe your own marketing bullshit…” in reference to how he has seen some CAD companies die out. Jeff has a background from PTC, but was referring to Computervision, which was purchased by PTC…

According to Bernard Charles, there is something afoot to replace Moldflow. He said the scientists at Simulia have ideas on how to solve the mold filling simulation problem.

Jeff Ray says that profit is the one measure that cuts through all of the BS, it is a measure of how much your customers value what you do.

Bernard Charles says that he had offered to buy Solid Edge for $120 million. This was before the SolidWorks acquisition. Solid Edge had more sales and assets at the time, but DS declined and bought SW for 3x the money instead.

More later…