Matra Division yesterday placed its Cas.Cade geometric modelling libraries into the open source domain, predicting that it would multiply its user base by ten in three years, and achieve similar growth in sales associated with the product.
The subsidiary of French defense group, Aerospatiale Matra, has spent 15 years building a niche for Cascade in the scientific and technical application development market, with most of its $4.5m annual sales stemming from component software licenses. By going open source, Marc Gainette, director of business for Cascade open source, believes Matra will be able to grow its Cascade related sales to between $35m and $50m by 2002.
The shift away from a license fee model, to a service revenue business built around Open Cascade is seen as an opportunity for the French company to establish its product as a global standard. Gainette believes an immediate effect of the open source decision will be to broaden Cascade’s customer base, opening it to research centers and other higher education bodies. In the medium term this will make Cascade an easier choice for industrial user to make as Cascade-educated users filter into the employment market, Gainette said.
By loosening the reins to Cascade’s development path, Matra also expects to encourage more new and existing customers to broaden the Cascade feature set and capabilities, but he emphasized that Matra has no intention of giving up its own commitment to Cascade’s evolution. The company plans to expand its internal development staff, while refocusing its effort on turnkey solutions based on the Cascade component set.
Gainette said Matra is also already assembling a core team of Cascade application developers, including contributors from the research and industrial communities, who will co-ordinate Open Cascade application development efforts among themselves. The strategy for this core team will be finalized by January he said, and in the longer term, once development priorities have been established, Matra and its Open Cascade partners hope to be able to draw on support from the European Union, which is currently keen to propagate open source development efforts in Europe.
Demonstrations of Open Cascade technology are already accessible at opencascade.com, and Linux compatible source code will be available at opencascade.org from December 20. Open Cascade for SGI Unix, Sun Solaris, IBM AIX and Microsoft Windows NT will be available from January.
