why pro-e while Catia is beginning to be the rule ?

I've read in the last thead that somebody wrote that pro-e is death.
And I'm honest, I see a lot of my suppliers and customers changing from pro-e
to Catia or another cad. Subcontractors (SMALL BUSINESS) can't afford to
change cad all the time.

It is wrong and foolish to say that Pro/E is dead. See the balance sheets of different CAD companies and you will see the reality. I know the people who use both Pro/E and CATIA. All of them agree that for modelling and assembly handling Pro/E is better. Although it is true that Pro/E people should wake up know as other vendors are outsmarting them. They should rethink about cost. Removal of bugs should be priority instead of frequently changing the layout of interface. N P Singh

Pro/engineer will never die.I agree some cad pacakages are available in the market,with less cost. But the modeling/assembly functionality of pro/engineer is truely excellent.

With the recent acquisitions having taken place, the CAD marketplace is shaping up to have 4 major competitors:
1.Dassault Systems - CATIA, ENOVIA, etc.
2.UGS (or EDS) - UniGraphics, SolidEdge, and recently acquired/soon to be assimilated SDRC I-DEAS
3.Pro/Engineer
4.AutoCAD - AutoCAD, Mechanical Desktop, etc.

These four entities split the mid- to high-end CAD market into nearly four equal 25% shares, and that's the way it will stay for the forseeable future.

Most of the reasons for companies switching away from Pro/E ultimately stem from the lack of integration functionality as well as a basic failure to set the product up correctly. The lack of integration is changing daily...we are embarking on a project that will enable bi-directional data exchange between Pro/Engineer and SAP, our manufacturing software. SAP will embed and maintain all Pro/E data, while the Pro/E interface will remain constant.

You should review the other thread in this group titled 'Pro/ENGINEER or CATIA?' - there are good points made there.

BTW - While at the Auto-Tech conference in Detroit, a Daimler/Chrysler representative was questioned about when/if they were going to migrate to CATIA V5...he responded that since the amount of work to do so roughly equals the amount of work to migrate to another CAD system altogether, he couldn't predict when the migration would take place, if at all.

Another point of interest is that the automotive industry maintains a large number of CAD seats, and a large percentage of the seats out there are only there because their customer (OEM) requires them to. Among companies that have a choice in the matter (Tier 2 suppliers, etc), you will notice that Pro/E has quite a large market share.

Recneps