RAYLASE Strengthens Innovation with PLM Solutions from IBM and Dassault Systèmes

Plans to reduce time to market and development costs in less than one year using SMARTEAM

Stuttgart, Germany, March 8, 2005 - IBM and Dassault Systèmes (Nasdaq: DASTY; Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA) today announced that RAYLASE has chosen their Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Solutions to streamline its product development processes and reduce both time to market and development costs.

With SMARTEAM, a leading collaborative product data and lifecycle management solution, RAYLASE, an international pioneer, developing modular components and subsystems for laser beam deflection, projects a return on investment in less than one year. During that period, the company expects the size of its SMARTEAM implementation to increase significantly. SMARTEAM is an IBM PLM solution developed by Dassault Systèmes

Since its foundation in 1999, RAYLASE, a mid-sized company, has grown rapidly and today is the worldwide market leader in its area of business. RAYLASE will use SMARTEAM to integrate, in an open environment and in a flexible way, the engineering disciplines of electrical, software, mechanical and optical design, thus creating and managing consistent data in a secure environment. That data will be accessible by the company’s extended network of partners.

SMARTEAM meets RAYLASE’s specific requirements because of the solution’s strong set of industry templates and its open architecture and adaptation to IT standards, as well as its flexibility in leveraging data from existing enterprise applications and systems. SMARTEAM will also ensure that the company’s future needs are met when the complete system definition, its requirements and its functional and local design are managed in a consistent environment.

"In the electronics industry, we need highly flexible solutions to integrate our innovative laser components into our customers’ products, whether those customers are end-users or OEMs," said Peter von Jan, CEO of RAYLASE. "Thus, we need powerful and easy to adapt solutions. With SMARTEAM, we will not only manage more efficiently all our engineering documents, but also better integrate our dynamic partner network, taking into consideration a very large range of international as well as local standards requirements with which our components and products must comply. The key factor in our market is innovation combined with flexibility, and IBM as well as the SMARTEAM solution, provide us with just that."

"RAYLASE, like other electronics companies today, is facing a most challenging business and market environment: As the pace of innovation and technology accelerates, RAYLASE is requested to deliver its products faster, with a higher quality and at a reduced cost," said Harald Robok, manager of PLM Central Region for IBM Europe Middle East and Africa. "At the same time, RAYLASE is facing increasing product complexity. Our open and flexible PLM Solutions will help them meet those tough challenges and increase both quality and innovation while cutting costs and product development cycles. This is another acknowledgement of our continuous and strong dedication to support highly innovative electronics companies."

"SMARTEAM will serve as a competitive advantage for RAYLASE in a fast-changing market," said Denis Senpéré, vice president PLM Europe, Dassault Systèmes. "In the world of laser-based technologies, speed of innovation is critical. With SMARTEAM, RAYLASE will be able to integrate its partner network, manage its multi-disciplinary data efficiently, and ensure that it exceeds the requirements of its customers. RAYLASE understands the transformative value of PLM and will quickly experience the cost savings and reduced development time that our PLM solutions have been proven to deliver."