What are Dassault & Microsoft Up To?

The rumor mill is running rampant on what these two powerhouses will announce this Wednesday at noon EST.

Certainly Microsoft is making a concerted push into the Product Lifecycle Mgmt (PLM) space with numerous co-announcements at the recent PDMA conference in Chicago (they were also a major sponsor of the event). Now they are preparing a separate news/conference call for Wed. regarding some new development in their relationship with Dassault.

Dassault, the leading PLM supplier in the market today has their products running within the MS environment and some products, such as their PDM solution SmarTeam and SolidWorks operate within MS desktop platform. So, if Dassault already is using MS technology, what could be so significant as to justify such a call? I have an idea:

Dassault is a long-time partner of IBM and has committed to the IBM WebSphere platform as its backbone. Thus, the only thing that may warrant such a Conf call is Dassault's decision to adopt .Net as a competing backbone to WebSphere. Longtime customer of both of these companies, Boeing, could be the instrumental player behind the scenes here in making this happen for their 7E7 program.

So why is this so important:

• Signals a slight distancing in the relationship btwn IBM and Dassault. This has been going on for the last year or so but seems to be accelerating as of late.
• Gives Microsoft another key player in the PLM market (they are already close with numbers 2 & 3, UGS and PTC).

Of course, this Conf. call could be nothing more then puffery - I certainly have experienced enough of those calls to last a lifetime - in which case the two companies state that they see one another as strategic partners and will work together to improve the lives of their customers, blah, blah, blah...

Stay tuned, will report on Conference call Wednesday.