Dassault Systèmes buys No Magic: What does this mean?

It was foreseeable after Dassault and No Magic had already developed a Closer cooperation had announced. It has recently become official that a Acquisition is planned.

Dassault is a French multibillion-dollar corporation that operates in the SE for products such as Catia, Simulia and many others. NoMagic is a small company from Lithuania that has made a name for itself in modeling (UML, SysML) has made.

The acquisition makes sense for Dassault: MagicDraw is a sensible addition to Dassault's portfolio and hardly competes with the existing offering. Whether the purchase is also good for the customer will be examined here.

Everything from a single source

Like many other companies, Dassault has organized its products under a superordinate brand, in this case 3D Experience. The idea is simple: this portfolio approach allows customers to buy only the components they need and thus optimize costs. The overarching framework ensures that the tools are coordinated and integrated. This approach is also pursued by IBM, for example, with its Jazz platform.

That sounds tempting and can work well in practice. However, it is risky in several respects: firstly, you are tied to one provider. If this provider has problems or exploits its strategic role with the customer, the customer has a big problem. In a heterogeneous Worksug landscape the problem is correspondingly smaller in such a situation.

On the other hand, you are (usually) dependent on the manufacturer's tools. This means that weak components may be used, as better ones are difficult to integrate into the ecosystem. More on this below.

It is also problematic if the provider has several components for the same task. This can happen through acquisitions, for example, and then it is quite possible that a component will be discontinued at some point. It's annoying if you've backed the "wrong horse". From this point of view, it will be interesting to see how Siemens deals with the acquisition of Polarion. After all, Siemens already has an RE tool in its portfolio (Teamcenter Requirements).

Modularity and openness

The alternative is to integrate tools from different manufacturers. The key question is whether a modular solution can ever be as seamless as a solution that comes from a single source.

This question cannot be answered so easily and must be evaluated individually. A concrete example from software development: there you need both an editor to edit source code and a compiler to process the code. Historically, these two tools were separate from the outset, but this hardly caused any problems. Over time, integrated development environments (IDE) became established. However, these also generally allow the compiler to be exchanged transparently.

Unfortunately, the exchange of requirements has not worked so well so far: For a long time, there was no satisfactory solution, and customers either had to rely on proprietary solutions or use lossy formats such as PDF, Word or Excel. In the meantime, with ReqIF a decent standard, but one that is currently only incompletely and/or poorly supported by many tools.

IBM is an interesting case here: IBM relies on its Jazz platform. At the same time, Jazz uses an open standard, OSLCto integrate the components of Jazz. OSLC was significantly co-developed by IBM, and IBM was already using openness strategically at the beginning of 2000: At that time, they launched the Open source platform Eclipse has turned the world of Java development tools on its head.

IBM's approach is interesting in that there really is the option of introducing other tools into the tool landscape via OSLC. How well this works in practice is another question.

And Dassault?

Unfortunately, I'm not quite so optimistic about Dassault, because unlike NoMagic, Dassault has tended to hold back on open interfaces and integration options. Christian Muggeo has an interesting article written.

MagicDraw is an excellent tool. It will certainly remain so. The question is rather how it will develop further at Dassault. Will the open APIs remain? Will the standard formats such as XMI or ReqIF be developed further? Official statements on such topics should be taken with a grain of salt.

The second caveat is that after an acquisition, integration into the existing portfolio usually has a higher priority than developing new features. This is also not necessarily the best news for users of No Magic. Interestingly, this can bring measurable benefits for customers, even if the situation feels worse for engineers.

On the other hand, a company like Dassault has completely different resources and can move a lot accordingly. Only time will tell what this means for MagicDraw.

Image: Flickr / Hypnotica Studios Infinite