Dassault Slowly Fixing Brand Confusion

Dassault Systemes changes its Delmia brand to Dassault Systemes Delmia Corp. Dassault's brands are:

CATIA -- design, CAD.
ENOVIA -- data management and collaboration
SIMULIA -- simulation.
DELMIA -- digital manufacturing.

Throw in a host of product names, as well as V4, V5, and V6, plus R-numbers, and that whole 3D VIA thing and its multiple offspring, not to leave out SolidWorks, COSMOSworks -- solving brand name confusion has a ways to go at Dassault.

Not that other CAD vendors have it any easier, what with PTC and its 42 add-on modules, five versions of Pro/E, the whole WindChill thing and its plug-ins and links, incompatible software like CoCreate, technical publishing stuff, and so on. Or Autodesk with its 60+ (or maybe it's 70+ or 80+) products scattered about CAD, entertainment, GIS, gaming, and municipal emergency preparedness.

Whatever happened to just plain VersaCAD vs AutoCAD? Ah, the good old days, when we foolishly thought that "the sky's the limit" when it came to capabilities of just one CAD v1.x package. Now it seems that the sky's the limit when it comes to product proliferation.

Link.

Comments

[Jim Lonley]

VersaCAD!, You old dog, you!

I love VersaCAD. I am an AutoCAD user (since R13) but still have VersaCAD/386 and a copy of VersaCAD for Windows 2003.

Now, there's one lesson Autodesk could learn from. Must confess that I can not get my head around Lisp and.... Visual Basic??? What's with that. I remember Basic when it was just that.... "Basic". Anyway, I could reasonable preogeam in VersaCAD's CPL (A C-Like programming language) It was easy. JUst record a macro - which itself wrote CPL code. Then with the CPL help in hand (also in the days when you could have it "in hand") one could learn by tweaking and expanding on the macro written CPL code. Now, if the new AutoCAD macro recorded wrote LISP files, what a head start that would be foe newbies!

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Jim Oldguy Longley

[rachael Dalton-Taggart]

Dassault is a victim of its own acquisition success. In my view it has acquired companies without having an existing brand strategy in place to deal with the naming problems that accompany this kind of business development. This has resulted in an incredibly confusing set of diverse product naming regimens that can leave you pretty brainless after slogging through the company web site.

That being said, they are making an effort. But is it the right one? I say no - at least thus far.

DS' most recent 'rebranding' press release (http://www.3ds.com/news-events/press-releases/release/1743/1/?no_cache=1) announces that it has changed the name of its North American location from Delmia Corp to Dassault Systemes Delmia Corp. (well, there's a switch!)

Earlier this year it started to really try and align its Enovia products by promoting the Enovia names in front of MatrixOne and Smarteam, as well as its original Enovia product. This is a start but by no means clear for the end user - yet.

I am not panning DS for trying: indeed, they have a heck of a problem to tackle here. The product naming has been way out of control in recent years. I just hope they aren't paying a branding firm too much for the results they are getting...

rach