Los Angeles —MSC.Software and Dassault Systemes have announced an alliance, whereby MSC will develop FEM applications within the Dassault V5 environment. CATIA users will have direct access to MSC's Nastran and other solvers, and MSC will be able to draw on such Dassault technology as knowledge-based modeling.
This alliance is non-exclusive—MSC also delivers technology to partners like UGS and CoCreate. "We have an open multi-CAD strategy, and that's one of the bases of our partnership with Dassault," says Richard Bush, MSC's director of marketing communications. "We provide pieces of technology to partners to use as components in third party systems. Sometimes the CAD company develops the interface, sometimes we do—depending on the situation."
Likewise, Dassault has a partnership with LMS, and clearly intends to offer users a great deal of choice in FEA solutions. CATIA contains a number of proprietary FEA solvers, and the company recently acquired Structural Research & Analysis Corp. (SRAC), developers of COSMOS design analysis programs.
MSC's Patran will use some technology from CATIA V5 "to make it easier for users to focus on particular types of products," says Bush. "The products we'll develop in the V5 environment will make it easier to develop future software and applications. Engineers should find doing analysis faster and more focused when they use them."
Keith Perrin of UGS's Scenario CAE operations says his company's partnership with MSC will continue, but that UGS will no longer resell Nastran solvers embedded in Scenario. "Rather than favor any one set of solvers, we'll let Unigraphics users choose to obtain FEA solvers from MSC, ANSYS, Abaqus and others," Perrin says.
Referring to Dassault's V5 architecture, Rishi Madabushi, business development manager, IBM Product Lifecycle Management, says, "This is next generation architecture that makes it possible to provide any application associated with product lifecycle management." IBM markets, sells and services Dassault products. Other Dassault products built on the V5 architecture include Enovia PDM and the Delmia manufacturing software suite.
Shortly after announcing the partnership with Dassault, MSC acquired AES (including Dassault's 19% previous ownership), a southern California-based major systems integrator and reseller of CATIA
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