Last week, Dassault announced that they have outsourced the development of Enovia SmarTeam to a group of PLM experts called artizone. The new company is led by Alex Zeltcer, former CEO of the SmarTeam Brand at Dassault. Essentially, Zeltcer has hired the majority of the former development team in Israel and will provide support and software updates for both current and new SmarTeam customers.
'What is with the name?' you may be asking. I asked the same thing. We have a lot in common..artizone, we are told, means a "zone for artisans." If you were are not overly impressed with this explanation, join the club (this coming from a guy that works for "InFlow"). At least it doesn't end with "ia" (see Catia, Simulia, Enovia, Delmia, 3D Via, etc).
Having spoken to Dassault last week, I took away one key message: artizone is a development shop. They are there to continue development and to enhance the SmarTeam V5 platform. We are told that nothing will change from a customer perspective...support will remain available through InFlow, and InFlow will provide support requests to an experienced team with whom we have worked for a number of years.
This announcement was extremely well received by our staff. While we have heard great things about the Enovia V6 platform, the roadmap that will take our customers from V5 to V6 (which is based on the MatrixOne platform) is not yet released. artizone will assure our current SmarTeam customers that the platform that they rely on to manage their product development data and processes is safe for the foreseeable future.
