October 28, 2020
DATADVANCE Celebrates 10th Anniversary
DATADVANCE turns ten In October 2020! In this article we look back to see how far we have come as a company in ten years, and uncover the software and business development strategies.
Company milestones
2003 – 2009
Prehistory
The history of DATADVANCE traces back to projects for Airbus Group, called EADS back at the time. By 2007, they realized that different projects required solving very similar mathematical problems related to data analysis and optimization. The team decided to simplify and automate these repetitive tasks and develop an algorithmic library with the advanced and efficient methods to solve such problems.
2009
MACROS (pSeven Core)
The first version of this Python library named MACROS was released in September 2009. It is currently available in DATADVANCE product line as pSeven Core.
2010
Incorporation of DATADVANCE
In 2010, MACROS developers and representatives of Airbus Group incorporated a company named DATADVANCE to develop and commercialize the software.
2012 – 2019
The era of pSeven
Initially, MACROS meant to be an internal instrument of Airbus. The developers soon realized that there was an opportunity to go beyond a Python library and create a full-fledged commercial product valuable for many other industry actors. Speaking of the value: one of the results achieved due to the implementation of MACROS at Airbus was design time reduction by 10% (in average) in all the departments!
The path from mathematical algorithms to a full-fledged industry solution took over two years. In 2012 DATADVANCE introduced pSeven – software tool for engineering process automation, design optimization and predictive modelling with an easy to use graphical user interface. pSeven allows capturing complex design processes by integrating CAD/CAE software you are using and other engineering software tools into a single workflow, define its logic and collect, analyse and reuse engineering data. It allows to compose a model of the product from different data sets, analytical and simulation models, explore this model with tools for Design Exploration and predict responses for new designs or operational regimes of the product with the tools for Predictive Modeling. Smart Selection technique democratizes the usage of pSeven, as it automatically chooses the most appropriate method of Design Space Exploration (DSE) or predictive modelling based on the problem description. That makes the advanced methods of the product available for non-math experts.
Cooperation with Airbus at an early stage enabled to develop and implement pSeven in the most advanced global industrial sectors that already had vast experience of implementing such technologies.
DATADVANCE development team currently announces two major releases of pSeven per year.
2016
Independence and opening of the office in Toulouse
In 2016 as a part of Airbus venture development strategy, the founders of DATADVANCE redeemed the company's shares, and Airbus left the structure of shareholders. Since then DATADVANCE became a totally independent engineering software editor, which created an additional push for its further development.
That is when company opened an office in Toulouse. Toulouse was chosen as it is a key hub for Airbus Group. Also, Occitanie Region is the home for several R&T clusters that stimulate the regional economy. Being a French resident greatly simplifies running business operations in France and Europe.
2014 – Nowadays
Resellers network and technology partnerships
From 2014, DATADVANCE starts looking for new markets outside Western Europe, and appoints local resellers in China, Japan, South Korea, India, Malaysia, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Turkey and United Kingdom in the following years.
To guarantee the best interoperability with the most popular engineering tools, DATADVANCE forges partnership with the leading software developers and engineering companies around the globe.
2019 – Nowadays
The era of pSeven Enterprise
As a result of ten years of close collaboration with the industry leading companies and thorough analysis of the market trends, DATADVANCE developed and released pSeven Enterprise ― a private cloud platform to collaboratively design the best products faster.
With pSeven Enterprise, DATADVANCE made a major shift of paradigm from the standalone software tool to the platform in a true sense, that allows you to build your own vertical applications for the Design Space Exploration, Digital Twins and Business Process Automation and publish these applications to make them accessible to every engineer in your organization. pSeven Enterprise ensures the continuity of the design, manufacturing and operations stages, as it allows to build and transfer predictive models, constituting Digital Twins, across domains. It can also be used as a standalone product by advanced end-users in all domains of large enterprises.
Key features of the product include those of pSeven plus four additional blocks of functionality: scalability, collaboration, extension and democratization through publishing of the applications in AppsHub ― a corporate library of workflow-powered web applications with a simple user interface. These features and server-side architecture of the platform improve collaboration within and between the teams, fasten resource-consuming studies with scaled computations, and grant possibilities to extend existing functionality.
Software development strategy: foundation for the next 10 years of innovation
DATADVANCE considers pSeven Enterprise as the foundation for the next 10 years of innovation. The development of the platform will continue in a customer-driven mode and is aimed towards moving from PLM (Design Space Exploration included) to building vertical business applications for Digital Twins and Business Process Automation.
In the short-and mid-term, DATADVANCE will develop both pSeven and pSeven Enterprise in parallel, and will continue supporting pSeven on a regular basis. In the same time, all the functionality of pSeven will gradually migrate to pSeven Enterprise. In the long run, in a few years, pSeven Enterprise will comprise both its own features and all the capabilities of pSeven, and then it will be made available as a standalone product.
To stay ahead of the competition, DATADVANCE will also continue to develop the algorithmic basis of pSeven ― pSeven Core. In the next two years, the following major new features will be added to predictive modelling and design optimization toolkits: Multilayer Neural Networks, GPU support, Time Series and more.
Business strategy
Due to company origins, the business strategy of DATADVANCE revolved around aerospace industry, also focusing on automotive, manufacturing and industrial processes domains. The COVID-19 crisis has changed the landscape, its' impact on aerospace is huge and dire. DATADVANCE has to adapt to the situation and realign the business strategy. Over a 5-year horizon, we target the markets that have shown the sustainable growth despite or due to the crisis ― energy (including renewable energy), electronics, consumer goods and health industry. This reprioritization is possible thanks to the industry-neutral nature of software tools developed by DATADVANCE.
To date, DATADVANCE has an operational office and a strong R&D team in Toulouse, France. DATADVANCE solutions are available worldwide through local offices and a reseller channel. The company actively develops sales channels through software distributors and business partners.
We want to celebrate and thank customers, resellers, technology partners and employees who have been on this journey with DATADVANCE over these ten years! We are proud of the accomplishments we have made and are looking forward to the next 10 years and beyond.