Today, Dassualy slips further into becoming the social cybernetic giant of the virtual product design world, with a few big bits of info announced today. Their revenue was up from last year, they have a new head of corporate communications and, at the same time, they’ve announced the acquisition of Internet social platform Netvibes and the forthcoming of its new 3D Experience platform. Praytell, what could this be?
3D Experience Platform
It’s extremely unclear exactly what the new 3D Experience platform is. The image above (bundled with the obscure press release) doesn’t help much either. It’s either a large grey button installed into your forearm used to battle your way through the design process or a social layer added to the V6 platform bringing in four social aspects of the process design workflow, none of which seem related to delivering fresh crepes to your doorstep. My guess? A 3D space, a virtual space, an information gather space and an information sharing space. (Update: see below for info on what the button actually is.)
“3D virtual store applications, 3D visual logistics applications, as well as easy and real-time-connected business dashboarding have already changed the way companies operate. With the launch of our 3DSwYM brand, the acquisition of Internet companies such as Exalead and Netvibes (announced today), we are further reinforcing the Social Business Apps which are part of our 3D Experience platform,” – Bernard Charlès.
Update 2/9/2012
Dassualt has put up a 3D Experience platform website that offers more information about what is going on. It’s a platform that brings all of their brands together, creating a single ‘3D experience’ across all products. It’s still not clear (from the information and videos on the site) if it is a separate product creating a hub for all the applications or if it is simply an underlying product strategy.
Update 2/10/2012
Some more details from Dasssault Communications:
- DS considers “3D Experience” as the “after-PLM” stage. The more complex the underlying software is, the simpler the user experience should be.
- It’s all about optimizing products and designs in the virtual, 3D world to enable better product delivery.
- Some Ds brands make the 3D, some enrich the experience.
- The image is meant as a description of the key components of 3D Experience as DS sees it: 3D modeling, content and simulation, search, social innovation, real time 3D experience.
Dassualt (hearts) Netvibes
Do you remember Netvibes? It’s a French start-up that originally began as dashboard for your website feeds. It slowly evolved into a platform where you could access the majority of the sites you visit, adding ways to interact with people and track your interests. I have everything from news and weather to socials stats and searches. The pulse of your online activity, all nicely organized in tabs.
Netvibes allows companies to connect internal enterprise platforms, databases or systems with external cloud apps, social feeds and live sentiment monitoring to create a real-time dashboard. Netvibes also helps more than 4 million people each month to create intelligent dashboards to manage their daily digital lives.
The acquisition seemed odd at first, but Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini says it makes sense for to connect what people say about a product to the design process through the Netvibes dashboard. The pulse of your product design activity? Nicely organized into tabs? Now, that makes a little more sense. How Dassault will finally implement this? Who knows.
