Dassault Systemes Invests $6 Million In Invention Machine Corporation Dassault Systemes' President Bernard Charles Joins Invention Machine's Board of Directors.

BOSTON & SURESNES, France--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 8, 1999--

Invention Machine Corporation Becomes a Strategic Dassault Systemes 

Partner to provide customers with a unique set of

Knowledge-based Innovation tools

Dassault Systemes S.A. (Nasdaq:DASTY) a worldwide leader in the CAD/CAM/CAE/PDM II market, today announced a $6 million investment in Boston-based Invention Machine Corporation, a leading provider of Knowledge-based Innovation software. Dassault Systemes' President Bernard Charles joins Invention Machine's board of directors, and Invention Machine becomes a strategic Dassault Systemes partner.

The competitiveness of companies is measured through their capacity to bring to market the right product at the right time. This is why customers are shifting their competitive imperative from "time-to-market" to "right-to-market" strategy. This requires a clear understanding of market requirements that will be translated into product objectives and an efficient execution system to transform engineering challenges into innovative solutions. The emphasis is shifting toward front-loaded technologies aimed at uncovering new design ideas and alternatives, stimulating and boosting innovation by increasing and sharing corporate know-how.

The two companies will work together to deliver Knowledge-based Innovation infrastructure and applications to provide customers with software tools to leverage knowledge across multiple engineering and scientific disciplines and generate innovative concepts to their technical challenges. Knowledge-based Innovation becomes an integral part of the new generation Virtual product development providing a breakthrough process to create innovative, cost-conscious products and optimizing the whole product lifecycle at once. It is the core of a new generation of conceptual design tools targeted to manufacturing industries.

"Dassault Systemes' investment in our company recognizes our leadership in engineering Innovation and further extends our worldwide market presence", said Val Tsourikov, CEO of Invention Machine Corporation. He continued: "The deal provides Invention Machine with the resources to invest in its signature product, TechOptimizer(tm) 3.0, as well as its future Knowledge-based Innovation products leverages our unique semantic processing technology".

"This agreement further confirms our intention to make knowledge a core component of our strategy as it is one of our next generation system fundamentals with the Version 5 portfolio. The partnership between our two companies will enable us to create a revolutionary new way to enhance product development innovation competitiveness by more effectively leveraging and extending intellectual capital across a virtual real time collaboration environment", said Bernard Charles, President of Dassault Systemes. The partnership is a logical step forward to integrate product development and knowledge management for our mutual customers.

"Honda strategy is to continue its implementation of Digital Manufacturing Circle (DMC) around a unified integrated architecture with CATIA and is expanding to address knowledge management and innovation support tools around a future integration of CATIA and TechOptimizer," said Kobayashi San, Executive Chief Engineer of Honda Research & Development Technology.

TechOptimizer(tm) 3.0 includes seven modules that helps users correctly state and solve their engineering problems, generate concepts and access technical knowledge across the enterprise. TechOptimizer(tm) 3.0 enables engineers to speed the development of new products and processes, avoid expensive trial-and-error techniques in the early stages of design, and creates high-quality engineering solutions.

Dassault Systemes S.A. is a leading software developer for the CAD/CAM/CAE/PDM II market -- providing users with solutions for their product development needs. CATIA**-CADAM Solutions and Deneb solutions enable total simulation of the creation of a product. SolidWorks, a wholly owned subsidiary, offers design-oriented, software solutions based on Windows. With Java-based CATWEB e-business tools, everyone can exploit engineering data over the web. ENOVIA PDM II Solutions deliver a new multi-CAD collaborative and innovative environment for the virtual product and process modeling and management across the extended enterprise. The Company's customer base comprises over 13,000 CATIA-CADAM and 9,500 SolidWorks customers.

Invention Machine Corporation's mission is to be the worldwide leader in software and services for innovation in product and process development. As the leading provider of Knowledge-based Innovation software, Invention Machine Corporation enables scientists and engineers to create and manage knowledge in order to develop new products and processes more quickly. Invention Machine Corporation's revolutionary software tools provide users with the knowledge and ability to stimulate the rapid production of high-quality, well-designed products and processes.

In addition to servicing Fortune 1000 companies in the United States and Europe, Invention Machine Corporation provides software and training to more than 35 leading Japanese companies belonging to the Invention Machine Corporation and Mitsubishi Research Institute (MRI) consortium. Invention Machine Corporation is based in Boston and, internationally, has offices in Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Taiwan, and Venezuela.

For more information on products, please call 1-800-595-5500.

Information on CATIA can be found at http://www.catia.com. Information on Dassault Systemes is available at http://www.dsweb.com

CATIA is a registered trademark of Dassault Systemes SA.

TechOptimizer(TM) is a trademark of Invention Machine Corporation.