CAD Companies Fight Over Boeing

Making planes, especially military planes and the weapons associated with them, is about the sexiest job for an engineer. I know, it's sad. Still, this is an engineering fact of life not wasted on PR professionals who will take every opportunity to highlight their clients role in the creation of the latest and greatest technology in the sky.

Boeing’s JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munition) Program migrated product data from multiple legacy systems to Teamcenter, says UGS. (artist concept supplied by Boeing)

Boeing, being the biggest aircraft manufacture in the US if not the world, is tracked very closely. It wasn't long after we ran the story "Boeing Selects UGS Teamcenter for Future Projects" that we got an email from Dassault's PR agency that begged to differ -- and made the following points:

• this is not a new contract (not a win by UGS)
• UGS footprint at Boeing is actually decreasing, all UGS CAD-based programs migrating to Dassaults’ CATIA-ENOVIA technology
• contrary to what the UGS press release says, only legacy data management is affected

Dassault gets a lot of mileage out of Boeing being perceived as a CATIA house, so I can understand them being miffed at UGS trying to steal the spotlight. But it was the last point that concerned us the most as Dassault (through their PR agency) pretty much calls UGS a liar.

In an apparent attempt to address the fallout from their original release, UGS answers with a Daratech report in which analyst Monica Schnitger points out that Boeing started using SDRC's Metaphase (which turned into TeamCenter after UGS acquired SDRC) since 2000. Also, Schnitger confirms that UGS TeamCenter will "form the data management backbone for all future programs at Boeing..."

This was confirmed by Jeffrey Rowe of MCAD Weekly, who stated, "Boeing chose Teamcenter as its enterprise-level data manager for all new programs going forward."

Now who's a liar?

Comments

[Nikhil Patel]

Can you tell me Main challenges of PDM in implementation?

[Mark]

There are lots of US companies that provide the same work and pay their employes a fair wage. Try opening a company in the US first

[dprawel]

I suspect there's a little marketing spin going on here, but let's not lose sight of the fact that someone relatively senior at Boeing approved this release, and this isn't easy stuff to make happen. They could of course be setting up for a license re-negogiation with Dassault.

From a higher level perspective, I think this is further confirmation of a trend that has been ongoing for years... UGS (and SAP long before them) seems to recognize that one who owns the data owns the customer. Concurrently as Dassault continues to confuse the market with multiple PDM-related solutions integrated by little more than marketing fluff, UGS has attacked the data "backbone" with fervor. UGS will (probably already does) own the data backbone, and they're probably willing to risk giving up some of the (less strategic) CAD desktops to get there. This will prove a good move in the end.

[Martyn Day]

Who cares? That bomb looks 'fun', certainly appears to be something you wouldn't want falling out of the sky on you. Product Deathcycle Managment anyone?

[Gautam]

Well, these kind of things do happen between any competiting companies. Dassault's reaction is obvious, i guess UGS would also have said similar things had Dassault won this deal.

I recall the reaction of a hardcore Dassault fan after UGS won the Nissan Deal last year.
Said he "Nissan was already an Ideas customer, so no big deal in they going with NX"
But, what was Dassault doing in that account for more than 2 yrs, fighting tooth and nail to sell Catia there? Why waste time in an already sold out account.

I do agree with some of the people here that the PLM companies should not loose their focus on CAD. CAD is the entry point towards PLM and i guess no one recognises it better than UGS.

[Titus Ruch]

Well Professor Tara, you've stepped into a hornet's nest on this one! I submit that only Boeing can really shed some light on this (well, perhaps not). BTW, I totally agree with James' remarks about CAD vs. PDM, PLM, etc.

[James]

Boeing probably uses lots of applications, and has lots of different divisions. I would be surprised if Autodesk doesn't list them as a major account. The 787 is all Catia designed, not sure what PDM is managing it. It seems like the top CAD companies like PTC, UGS, are putting less emphasis on the CAD applications they have. They treat is as a commodity vs PDM/PLM. Isn't the engineering part of product design really the most important? Dassault seems to be the only company left that is placing emphasis on solving engineering problems. The v5 architecture is new compared to 1980 Parasolid and 1988 PTC.
the Abacus purchase is engineering focused. Why has everyone lost sight of CAD? I would really like to see something revolutionary in CAD like PTC did in 1988 by introducing parametric modeling.
PLM and PDM don't create products.

[Evan Yares]

"all UGS CAD-based programs migrating to Dassaults’ CATIA-ENOVIA technology"?

Not likely. Boeing has existing programs that are likely to stay with UGS CAD software for a very long time.

In any case, ENOVIA is not CAD. So far as I know, Boeing is not migrating anything to ENOVIA -- though I'd be interested to hear if I'm wrong. I've actually never heard any substantial ENOVIA success stories.