Leading carmaker streamlines product development and more efficiently delivers innovative new products with Dassault Systemes' solution on the Microsoft platform. -- Today at the 2006 Japanese CATIA Forum (JCF), Microsoft and Dassault Systemes announced that Toyota Motor Corp. (TMC) has adopted CATIA V5, Dassault Systemes' virtual product design product lifecycle management (PLM) solution on Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. TMC's use of CATIA V5 on the Microsoft platform demonstrates the customer benefits of the global strategic alliance between Dassault Systemes and Microsoft. Announced in November 2004, the alliance provides deeper integration between Dassault Systemes' V5 PLM and 3-D collaborative solutions and the Windows client and Windows Server platforms to enable more flexible customer solutions that are cost-effective, easy to deploy and easy to maintain. All V5 PLM products take advantage of the familiar Windows experience but with the dramatically enhanced power of 64-bit. "Having Dassault Systemes and Microsoft working together is a key success factor for CATIA V5 on 64-bit," said Yoshikazu Amano, managing officer for Toyota Motor. "The alliance of the leader in PLM with the leader in computing technology provides us with a solution that extends the memory capacity necessary to design and review large assemblies, and ultimately enables us to deliver innovative products to the market more efficiently and cost- effectively." As a part of the design and manufacturing process, TMC requires huge amounts of data to support detailed and complex product designs and is faced with having to create and review large product models more accurately and quickly. TMC first deployed CATIA V5R16 with 64- bit in its technical and production engineering department in May, with plans to expand the deployment in a phased approach. As a result of the 64-bit environment, large assembly data can now be processed. In addition, Dassault Systemes and Microsoft worked together to provide a mechanism that helps ensure 32-bit Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros would run flawlessly in the 64-bit environment, enabling customers to efficiently leverage existing assets. Generally speaking, CATIA V5 on Windows XP 64-Bit Edition brings customers the following advantages: -- Streamlined product development. Virtually eliminates the need for the additional data handling often required on a 32-bit PC for huge assemblies and enables customers to load full product assemblies rather than partial assemblies. In addition, customers can perform generative updates on very large assemblies and support advanced design methodologies such as relational design. -- Improved product quality. Enables complex and extensive analysis and performs simulation on an entire product instead of multiple runs on partial components. Customers can also support visualization and complex simulations of larger mockups. -- Reduced time to market. Helps accelerate product design and simulation processes, reduces time to create or modify a design, and cuts the time needed for a simulation's computation. "We are pleased to see the Microsoft and Dassault Systemes' relationship and the computing power of 64-bit benefiting global customers such as Toyota," said Sanjay Parthasarathy, corporate vice president of the Developer & Platform Evangelism Group at Microsoft. "Today's announcement demonstrates how the winning combination of Microsoft platform technologies and Dassault Systemes' PLM solutions makes top-line product life-cycle management applications more accessible and affordable to customers throughout the manufacturing value chain." "With CATIA V5 on Windows XP 64-Bit Edition, our customers can make more decisions on product behavior at the virtual stage and on larger mockups, achieving significant improvements in quality, as well as reducing costs," said Etienne Droit, executive vice president of PLM Sales and Distribution at Dassault Systemes. "For better productivity and increased capacity, our customers require a significant memory upgrade, which CATIA V5 on Windows XP 64-Bit Edition brings, handling gigabytes of data easily and quickly."