CEO of Simulia Scott Berkey takes on additional duties as Managing Director of Dassault’s North American operations.
As part of the ongoing re-organization of Dassault’s divisions, Simulia CEO Scott Berkey has been appointed Managing Director of Dassault Systèmes’ North American business, which means he’ll be in charge of managing and growing all of Dassault’s lucrative business in North America.
Dassault founded Simulia with the acquisition of Abaqus in 2005. Berkey joined Dassault in 2006 as Vice President of Worldwide operations for Simulia and was appointed CEO in 2008. The Simulia group has been growing rapidly since 2005 with regular acquisitions building out the company’s capabilities. As further evidence of the company’s growth, Simulia moved its operations in 2014 into larger headquarters in Johnston, Rhode Island. They had been based nearby in downtown Providence.
As the CAD vendors add more simulation capabilities to their product lines, they have been anxious to increase the use of simulation throughout the design process and not just at the end, when a design is being validated or optimized. The segment is growing but it is not necessarily democratizing the way vendors had hoped. At the COFES (the Congress on the Future of Engineering Software) held just last week in April 2015, Simulia chief strategy officer Steve Levine noted that a small percentage of CAD users actually use simulation. He believes, and his colleagues in competitive companies believe, that there is room for enormous growth in the simulation industry, which will come as the tools become easier to use and powerful processors in desktop machines and in the cloud speed up the process.
Dassault has extended its interest in simulation into medical research with the work Simulia is doing in the Human Heart research project and also with the founding of Dassault’s Biovia group in San Diego. Berkey has been involved in these new-growth projects for Dassault. Meanwhile, of course, SolidWorks based in Boston represents a large and stable contributor to Dassault’s bottom line. It will be part of Berkey’s job to help knit Dassault’s widening interests in the U.S. into complementary drivers of growth for the company.
