In Thursday's Financial Times there is a picture on the front of the Companies and Markets section of Gates and Charles (head of Dassault) smiling and shaking hands with the caption:
"...met in Paris yesterday to unveil a linkup that will see the French Group's three dimensional design software integrated into Microsoft's servers and software."
There's no article to go with it. Anyone got any information on this? Could be a big thing for us S/W users if they are including S/W and not just their "high end" software.
" First Mover Advantage: The Dassault-Microsoft Agreement . . . . . Dassault Systèmes and Microsoft held a pair of press conferences last week to announce an agreement whose terms left the media scratching their collective heads. You can get a sense of the puzzlement from the Q&A summary posted at our Weblog:
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Since then, we have reviewed hours and pages of press material and arrived at this summary of what the agreement means:
This is a five-year agreement that allows Microsoft to better understand the collaboration needs of the high-end 3D CAD and PLM market. For Dassault, it permits input from Microsoft to make their PLM software work better on platforms provided by Microsoft, such as dot-Net and SharePoint. It also involves a secret sum of money.
In our opinion, the benefits to each company are:
Microsoft -- lowered resistance by Dassault customers to purchasing Windows-based software. Like the SAP agreement, this gives Microsoft access into areas it does yet understand.
Dassault Systèmes -- Catia, Enovia, and Delmia were developed to run on UNIX, but have since been ported to Windows. This agreement lets Dassault figure out how to make the software more Windows-friendly. It is our opinion that Dassault received a cash infusion from Microsoft, perhaps in the order of US0 million. Both companies deny that Microsoft purchased a share of Dassault.
Analyst John Moore of ARC Advisory Group thinks that large customers pushed Dassault to do more with Windows: "I bet it was Boeing. They're using the Dassault platform for their 7E7 initiative, and probably didn't want to glue together Enovia on WebSphere and SmartTeam on .NET."
The agreement ensures that Dassault's CAD software is the first to benefit to changes in Windows and other Microsoft software. As emphasized by William Gates, from now on it's Dassault first, other CAD vendors next. Hence, first-mover advantage."
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