Strumenta 
Why this interview?
Cédric Brun is the CEO at Obeo, a company that is very successful in the modeling area. In this interview with Cédric Brun, we’ll try to undestand more about modeling-driven techniques and their applications.
Here there are some quotes I found particularly interesting:
Acceleo was the first product we released. It’s used to create your own code generator for your target language or target architecture from any kind of model and as an input being it UML or any DSL, the main specific language that you could use as input.
With releasing Sirius web, (…) you can define your domain, your tool and get instant deployment. You don’t even have to package something, distribute to the user, to wait for them to try it and to get result to manage or the versions in the meantime and so on. Now, you can define your tool and instantly, the user gets a result, gives you a feedback, you change the tool and you get instant feedback and updated tool.
You would just take a file text and you will just mark “This is the keyword” for a class and so on. You would build the Ecore model while parsing files and then launch it on the source code and get a model. Thanks to the unification power of models and technologies you could then transform it using ATL or you could generate code into another technology with Acceleo.
If you look in the future, you’ll get tools which have awesome user experience, which are getting data from all the other systems in order to support engineering activities. You are going to be able to use statistics and AI and so on in order to help you make decisions while designing your architecture or your system or whatever. That’s pretty exciting and I really see the future there.
If you look at the system engineers, you have, maybe, one in 10 which did adopt SysML. With something like Capella, it can grow up to nine others because it’s really so much easier to use and more focused on the actual system engineers needs. There’s lots of potential of growth here.
Federico Tomassetti: Hi, Cedric. Nice to meet you. How are you today?
Cédric Brun: Hi, Federico. Nice to meet you too. I’m pretty good, honestly. Thank you.
Federico Tomassetti: Good. I’m particularly happy about this interview because today, we can speak about Obeo, which is a company that is very successful in the modeling area. My hope is that we can learn a lot from your experience and maybe take some inspiration and someone else can also be as successful as you’ve been in this area. Maybe we can start explaining the meaning of the name of the company.
Cédric Brun: Well, yeah. Obeo is name picked by the three founders. It’s a Latin word. It means moving forward.
Federico Tomassetti: Nice.
Cédric Brun: That’s the spirit we try to apply every day.
Federico Tomassetti: Nice. I think it’s a nice name because it’s inspiring. It’s also short. It’s memorable. Good choice. If I remember correctly, the company was founded in November 2005 or beginning 2006, right?
Cédric Brun: Yes. That’s right.
Federico Tomassetti: It is, now, quite in history, but can you tell us a bit about the history and the first years of the company?
Cédric Brun: Sure. The company was founded at the end of 2005 by three engineers, three developers, actually, which add a different experience in previous companies. They wanted to create their own to create new tools in order to accelerate development, software development. The company was founded by the end of the year. I, myself, joined the company at the beginning of the next year as the first intern. Well, it was, still, only those three founders in a small castle bakery. We are all together. I started my internship there. Well, now, Obeo is about 50 people and straight out in Nantes, Paris, Toulouse and also in Vancouver. I became the CEO of the company a few years ago.
Federico Tomassetti: Nice. You were saying that one of the goal of the founders was to accelerate development and about accelerating comes to mind, Acceleo, that I think was one of your first product. It was a code generator, right?
Cédric Brun: Yeah, that’s right. At the time, lots of people were speaking about modeling-driven techniques and MDA. There were these idea of generating code from human models and so on. Acceleo was the first product we released. We released this as an open source product from the get-go. Acceleo is used to create your own code generator for your target language or target architecture from any kind of model and as an input being it UML or any DSL, the main specific language that you could use as input.
Federico Tomassetti: Nice. I think one of the reason of the success of the company was also the connection to very strong and important client. I can think of Airbus, if I am correct, of Thales. Can you tell us about the big clients that you have been serving in these years?
Cédric Brun: Yeah. We have pretty big corporate clients. At the beginning, we decided to put Acceleo open source for two reasons. First of all, in order to be known, because only a few people in small bakery and so on. Making it open source will make us exist. Also, in order to give some ground tiers to these big corporations. Thales or Airbus or Pôle Emploi, which was one of the first customers we had also. Well, investing on your tools and you wanted to last because it’s a pretty big investment. When you’re speaking to a company which is not really known and which is like a few people, well, you can’t really make the decision to deepen on that for your tools. Being open source is a key factor in convincing those kind of companies.
Federico Tomassetti: Yeah. Also, because for people who don’t speak French, “Pôle Emploi” is the unemployment agency.
Cédric Brun: That’s right.
Federico Tomassetti: It’s a public agency. I think it’s hard to convince them, maybe, to trust a small company, right?
Cédric Brun: Yeah, and a tool vendor, in general. Such companies, they don’t want to be depending on tool venders. Of course, they are depending on IBM or some others in some way because they don’t have, really, the choice, but here, when you’re also small, it’s not like you’re IBM and you can’t just say, “Hey, use our tool and everything is going to be all right in 10, 20 or so on.” When Airbus build tools, used to design an airplane, for instance, they need to be able to support it and to adopt the tool for 50 to 70 years. Obviously, Airbus is not going to bet on the company being there for such a long time. Building as Open Source technologies give these guarantees.
Federico Tomassetti: Yeah. It’s difficult to think about these time scales because so many companies fail in a matter of a few years. When we think about Obeo, it’s a very established company, but it’s like 14 years old. Maybe they think in terms of 30, 50 years, it’s a different mindset.
Cédric Brun: Yeah, especially in software. Right.
Federico Tomassetti: Yeah. Okay. One thing, also, that I was interested in, in discussing about the role of your position because you have been founded in Nantes, right? You have also stronger connection with university in Rennes, so in the historical Brittany region, right? I was wondering if you think that it played a role to be based in that area and your relationship with Rennes and the university in Rennes.
Cédric Brun: Yeah. It definitely played a role. At the beginning in Nantes, there was this research lab led by Jean Bézivin, which is a well-known researcher in the modeling area, especially at that time, I would say, was one of the pioneers in France. Well, the engineers, the founders, two of them were coming from a company, which had very close tie with Jean Bézivin. This company is called, Sodifrance. Also, me, I had the pleasure to have Jean Bézivin as a student and to have him giving me courses. Definitely, all these influences which made me … when I got my degree, which made me look for an internship into modeling. The beginning of the company is very, very close to the university and to this relationship. We did start collaboration either on technologies like ATL or also, as part of research projects from European research project or French research project in order to, develop more innovation into the products and also to develop technologies as open source.
Cédric Brun: Well, these collaborations have grown. We are pretty close, now, also to INRIA Lab in Rennes, which share the same ideas which walks on the same thematics. Actually, I met with Benoit Combemale, which now is in Rennes, but I met with him while we were in Nantes. All this area is very dynamic from a modeling point of view. It’s also pretty dynamic from a software point of view. It definitely played a very positive role because my own story of having courses from teacher about modeling, introducing me to modeling and so on, we also experienced that with other students. Right. Other students from the Nantes area. They would explore the modeling, engineering and the main specific language and so on. Then, at one point, I needed an internship and we are here.
Federico Tomassetti: It seems very inspiring because it must not be easy to create these environment where there is positive cycle in a way, because maybe someone start researching on a subject and this inspire a company, Sodifrance and then another one. They all can be started and also, so students have a plaice where to apply what they’ve studied. I guess, the other way is also help you to have the possibility of finding employees who knows about modeling because I think to grow, now, you’re saying you are around 50 employees. It must be also not easy to find the right time.
Cédric Brun: Exactly. Exactly. You need to reach some kind of critical point where you have, well, several researchers or labs working on the same areas and trying to maintain these connections and to use every opportunity you have to work together, so that it’s strong enough to start the machine. Of course, it only works if it says some kind of translation into the business world if the company leaves.
Federico Tomassetti: It’s always challenging. Okay. Now, you were discussing in the beginning that you have, now, an office in Vancouver, right?
Cédric Brun: That’s right. Yeah.
Federico Tomassetti: Now, you are growing outside of Europe. I was curious about your impression between the differences between Europe and North America, in general, if you think they are close or they look at modeling or business in a different way.
Cédric Brun: Well, that’s a pretty broad question. There’s lots of differences. Yeah, we opened the branch in Canada. Stéphane is leading the branch there. Stéphane is the former CEO of Obeo and is now leading the branch in Canada. We opened it at a point where it was pretty obvious that we needed to be there to find customers, mostly, around the MBSE area. Everything around Model Based System Engineering and all of the offer around Capella that we are providing. We needed to be there to get in touch with the big industry or companies, which are there in the space, different automobile, automotive sector. Well, at that point, Obeo was already quite known or, at least that’s what we figured. We were one of the few Eclipse strategic members on the world.
Cédric Brun: Well, to us, it was obvious Obeo was quite known even there, but when we arrived there, well, we discovered that it will take some work to be really known there, because they tend to use other software tools from other vendors. In North America, they tend to have a mindset where they have a need, one corresponding tool and if the tool fits then it’s a deal. If, at some point, they want to change the tool, they change the tool. In Europe, the mindset is really more focused on adapting tools. Always having tools which is perfectly tailored for their use case. Well, in the North America, it’s more focused on off the shelf tool and it’s a tool meeting my requirement. Yes, no. In a way, it’s quicker because then you get the decision faster, but in France or in Europe, you can always tweak the tool and make sure it fits.
Cédric Brun: That’s one difference, I would say, from a customer’s point of view, which is pretty big because Obeo started with providing technology so that you can build your own tool. It’s very focused on customizing tools and adapting it on your need, which worked well in Europe. Then we moved to providing off the shelf tools either on enterprise architecture business or on model based system engineering. This can work in North America, but the whole build your own tool mindset is harder to grow there.
Federico Tomassetti: Yeah. There is, probably, also a lot of … Maybe education is not the right word, but a lot of effort to build awareness about these possibilities and…
Cédric Brun: Yeah. The whole ideas behind modeling which is like, well, you formalize or you create your own language and so on. I think from a cultural perspective, it makes a lot of sense for Europeans, French, Germans and so on. On the other side of the Atlantic, it’s probably less part of the culture of creating your own formalism and so on. They’re more looking for something which is already there and to use it.
Federico Tomassetti: Maybe we are more theoretical in our studies or in our mindset. Yeah. Across the years, did you find that more people are getting familiar with modeling, it’s becoming easier to, well, suggest to adopt modeling solutions or it’s stable?
Cédric Brun: We, at Obeo, try to make it easier and since the beginning, Acceleo was designed in a way which would make it easy to start with. With very fast turnaround, you would update your template and generate the code and go back to the model element and so on. Then we built Sirius with Thales at that point. Sirius was all about empowering the user to create his own domain specific model or just in a few minutes, right? You can define graphical modeler in 10 or 20 minutes, and that’s something which is already usable with very, very fast turnaround. You just change the setting and you get the result instantly. Because we use the other technologies for our projects with clients. We’ve seen that this long turnaround we need by adapting the model, generating the code and then adapting the code because of course, you have to customize stuff here and there, was really detrimental to getting to the point of having a good tooling. Because in order to get a good tooling, you have to test it with users. Otherwise, it’s not adopted.
Cédric Brun: We’ve made a pretty good job in making it accessible, I think, with Sirius. Now, with releasing Sirius web, we are getting one step further. Because now, you can define your domain, your tool and get instant deployment. You don’t even have to package something, distribute to the user, to wait for them to try it and to get result to manage or the versions in the meantime and so on. Now, you can define your tool and instantly, the user gets a result, gives you a feedback, you change the tool and you get instant feedback and updated tool. We are really focused on that, but that’s the product we build ourselves. If you look at the other technologies, it’s not as easy, I would say. That’s what we bring on the table ourself, but it’s been easier and easier over the years. If you look at all the UML modeling tools which were existing at the beginning of 2006, 2007 or 2008, they were pretty big tools with lots of pretty complex UI and so on. It got better.
Cédric Brun: Also, now that we’re moving to the web, it’s a good occasion to think, again, about what we want as a user experience. Because modeling, the biggest struggle with modeling tools is adoption and what does it tell you? It tells you that, most likely, the user experience is pretty bad. There’s still lots of room for improvements. I’m pretty excited about what’s coming up with Sirius web because we’re working with other companies, helping us in revising the user experience and thinking a bit outside of all this framework which has been put on us with the first human tools. It’s going to be quite interesting to see how it evolves.
Federico Tomassetti: Yes. Seeing that, basically, all the modeling and language workbench have some plan to move to the web. For some, it’s very difficult, like a person I remember interested in MPS. There are some experiments to bring MPS to the web. It seems very interesting to me, also, because I think that, in many cases, when we design this tooling, they were based on some frameworks. We will use as developers to build the tools themselves. Like in a way, everything that is based on Eclipse, look a little bit like the job ID Eclipse.
Cédric Brun: Yeah.
Federico Tomassetti: In MPS, it’s also very true. You create an editor and you have all the menus that are only useful to the language designer, not to the language user. Maybe if we move to the web, we can rethink a little bit, the product.
Cédric Brun: Yeah. All of this in order to get a better adoption of your tool. It really depends on the domain, but for many of our customers and users, they don’t want to see an IDE. Some of them, they really want and need the features of an IDE. With this technology, we try to cater for both, but Sirius Web in itself is, you just start it and it works. You don’t have to integrate it into another IDE. You could if you want to, but we want to make sure it’s usable even without, and so that you can deploy your graphical tool or modeling tool for users, which would, well, freak out looking at a menu with hundreds of options and actions like you can get in their IDE.
Federico Tomassetti: Yes. Well, we already started to talk a little more about technologies and products you are currently working on. You named Sirius web. We previously talked about Acceleo. Maybe, can we talk about Capella and its role for the company in your product line, let’s say?
Cédric Brun: Sure. Capella is quite a bit of history itself. At the beginning of Obeo, we worked with Thales in order to help them tool their methodology, their system engineering methodology, which is called, Arcadia. Well, when they came to us asking for graphical modelers, and we had the experience of GMF at that time, and we were like, “Yeah, it’s doable, but it seems like you need dozens of different diagramming. It’s going to be huge as a cost. It’s going to be a pain to maintain and so on.” That’s why we developed Sirius with them in order to be able to create such graphical modeling area and tooling quicker and to maintain it in the long time. Thales on his side was working on using Sirius in order to build what is now, Capella. Well, a few years later, Thales decided to make it open source and to provide such a tool which had 10 years of experience of Thales embedded in it through the methodology through all the accelerators and the tools and so on, and to make it open source and it became Capella.
Cédric Brun: Now, we are seeing more and more people adopting it everyday. We are currently running the Capella Days. We are seeing a significant growth in adoption. For Obeo, we are still working on the underlying technology, which is Sirius. Also, working in providing add-ons to either Sirius or Capella. We have an add-on which brings you the ability to collaborate in live on your system engineering model. In Capella, with no locking, diffing and something very easy. Just think about Google Doc but for models.
Federico Tomassetti: Yes.
Cédric Brun: We also build a product which is called SMW, System Modeling Workbench with Siemens, which actually integrates Capella with Siemens TeamCenter PLM, so that system engineers can integrate all the architecture definition into the complete lifecycle of a project and of a product. Well, we are extending this strategy of providing add-ons with other things coming up. We recently published a new product, which is part of the cloud offering which is called, Publication for Capella which allows you to use your Capella model, publish it on a server and it’s going to be accessible for anybody and accessible through OSLC APIs, so that you can connect it with an ALM like Polarion or another ALM which is able to speak OSLC.
Federico Tomassetti: Yeah. You were saying that this collaboration with Thales was going on for a long time, right?
Cédric Brun: Yeah.
Federico Tomassetti: You also named a partnership with Siemens. I wanted to ask if having this long going project was important to give you the time to do investments and improve your technology over time because maybe, it gives you more visibility.
Cédric Brun: Well, yeah. I would say, I think such a long project or such project, which gets renewed year after year is very important because we do build technologies and we do build it to last. In order to do that, we need some source of income and some source of input for a long time. If you look at Obeo’s top customers, it’s only multiyear relationships. It starts with a proof of concept and then if the proof of concept gets validated, then the company starts a real investment program to create a tool and deploy it, and maybe commercialize it and so on. It can only be a multiyear relationship because of course, it takes time to develop, it takes time to deploy, to get the result and to adopt and so on. This makes us pretty strong especially in a time like the crisis we’re living here. This way of working with such customers just gets repeated. They need it. We have this strong relationship year over year and then, me, myself as a CEO, well, can maybe take some risk here and there because I have this activity which is pretty stable.
Federico Tomassetti: We named very large clients because they think they are … well, they give you the possibility to prove your technology at a large scale and bring their own challenges, but I was wondering, do you also work with small clients or are your typical clients very large corporation or public administration?
Cédric Brun: Well, the typical client is pretty large, yes. We also work with smaller clients, but mostly on the offers which are off the shelves. Products which are ready to use and off the shelf here, we work with smaller organizations or intermediate organization which are acquiring the tool and deploying it and using it as it is or with small modification and so on, but all the activity, which is about building a tool, follow the long term and so on. Well, almost only with large clients or with some other organization, tool vendors, which want to build its own tool and commercialize it and so on, but as we do provide the technology as open source, such independent software do it on their own and ask us only for some expertise or help and so on but they are able to develop the tool on their own and develop their expertise up to a point and they need us when it gets trickier.
Federico Tomassetti: Yeah. Probably, many smaller clients just buy the tool, use them on their own, being very successful and maybe, you will never hear about them or learn about or they’re using it.
Cédric Brun: Yeah. Well, that’s part of the model, yes, but I hope they will get very successful. Actually, you have with more than 100 different tools which is displayed on the Sirius gallery, tools build on top of Sirius. Most of them Obeo did not get any revenue, but that’s the whole strategy of putting it open source. We do have an add-on which you can add to Sirius to provide this Google Doc like collaborative capabilities. In some way, successful tool built on Sirius can provide us revenues also.
Federico Tomassetti: Yeah. Or maybe someone in the smaller company start using it, see the benefits and when they move to a larger company, they can also advocate maybe.
Cédric Brun: Yeah.
Federico Tomassetti: We talked at the beginning about code generation when we talked about Acceleo. I was wondering if you also have considered reverse engineering. If it happens that you start working with companies that have already their solution and in a way you need to build a model from what they already have.
Cédric Brun: Yeah. Well, at the beginning of Obeo was the business model, which was really focused on this. We had the ability to accelerate developments and this part was open source in order to be known and so on. We also had the ability to reverse engineer any language into EMF models. With a technology, which is really efficient, but think about Sirius, the very fast turnaround and the instant feedback but for parsing text.
Federico Tomassetti: Okay.
Cédric Brun: You would just take a file text and you will just mark “This is the keyword” for a class and so on. You would build the Ecore model while parsing files and then launch it on the source code and get a model. Thanks to the unification power of models and technologies you could then transform it using ATL or you could generate code into another technology with Acceleo. At the beginning, that was a commercial part of Obeo. There was the acceleration of development which was the open source part and the reverse engineering which was the commercial part. Well, we did change at some point because it was very, very hard to get projects to build such tools even if we were quite efficient in building a tool to reverse engineer and to then generate. Mostly because I would say in France, there were like, maybe, four or five project each year of the right size in order to justify to create a tool to be more efficient.
Cédric Brun: In 2008, there were none, right? That’s been the crisis happening and then the big corporation were like, “Well, that’s legacy, but we are not going to migrate the legacy into something new. We are going to split things and try to replace things over time and so on.” That’s when we stopped this activity, but from a technical point, it was pretty fun and pretty interesting because then, we would have to parse millions of lines of codes and put it into an EMF model, which of course, well, EMF was not really designed for handling such a huge amount of data at first. We had to improve on it and then generate code as well. From a technical point of view, it was challenging, but now, the technologies is part of the history of Obeo, but it’s right there. It still run because Eclipse is so able to move forward while keeping compatibility. Looking at the machine, we have now, I think it’s most likely, really fast. That could be fun to try it on something else.
Federico Tomassetti: Yeah, but I think this is very interesting because from a technical point of view, I find that very interesting. I work, myself, with language migration and reverse engineering. I think it will be an amazing technology to have, but it’s interesting that you have a vision that combine the technology point of view but also the business point of view. Maybe, you have to make a business choice and something that is technically excellent. Maybe it’s not the best to spend energies on to grow the company.
Cédric Brun: The world premise of the technology was, let’s make it so easy to build a parser that for each project, you’re going to build a new one even if you already have one … you say “there’s a COBOL parser” that’s a nonsense to say there is a COBOL parser because there are a hundred of different COBOLS and each project use, I would say, its own COBOL. The technology itself was making it easy to create your own parser.
Cédric Brun: The parser would only work on your own legacy because you definite the rules in a way which works with your own legacy. Most of the customers, they were wanting, also, something which is, “Oh, you support COBOL, so that’s good. We are good. You just buy it.” The technology was not meant to be sold this way. It was more like, “Let’s build the parser for your own legacy code, and if we need more we’ll build another parser,” even if it’s also a COBOL, but then you get to decide what you really want to extract. The market was not really ready for that.
Federico Tomassetti: Yeah. No, I think it’s interesting because also, what I see with many companies that have legacy code and have been successful is that they tend to use the language in a specific way. They tend to use certain partners, the right code in a certain way. If you have something specific, you can take advantage of that, but I understand that this is a model that is less scalable because as you said, you need to adopt to every single client. Maybe it’s a good model for a consultancy company, small consultancy company, less good for a company who want to grow to the tens of employees.
Cédric Brun: At that time, it was also the time where all the activities on Domain specific modeling and graphical modeling were growing. We have this growth on one hand and we have this other business which was, well, not giving us what we were expecting. You need to make some choice. Even if there is maybe a model which would work, well, you go to the model which is now growing and which you know is going to work better.
Federico Tomassetti: Yeah. Okay. We have more or less 10 minutes. I want to be sure that we also have some time to discuss about the future and what you see that is interesting for the future. I would like to start with this very open question. What are the most interesting directions that you see for modeling? What are something that excite you or you think could be important in the future?
Cédric Brun: Well, what excites me is that it’s going to be more than ever possible for anybody to create his own tool. That’s what we are trying to achieve with Sirius web. To create it and to get value out of it because it’s going to be used outside. Also, what is really interesting is that, this all idea of having something on the web, but connected to others, I would say, data source and so on. We’re not trying to be the center of the ecosystem here and we are trying to integrate with PLMs, with ALMs and so on. If you look in the future, you’ll get tools which have awesome user experience, which are getting data from all the other systems in order to support engineering activities, right? You are going to be able to use statistics and AI and so on in order to help you make decisions while designing your architecture or your system or whatever. That’s pretty exciting and I really see the future there.
Federico Tomassetti: Yeah. This that you said made me think of an interview that I read with Jeff Bezos who was saying, “It was possible for me to build Amazon because there was a lot of infrastructure that I could use towards, I don’t know, companies offering hosting so I could lead the website, companies doing deliveries so I could do the delivery.” In a way, by building these technologies to permit to build tools, you also permit others to follow their own ideas and to create technology. You enable them anything that’s really powerful.
Cédric Brun: Yeah. Now, they are going to be able to create the tool, deploy it, be in contact with the users directly through chats or support or whatever and see how it goes, help them. Even just that, without even looking at all the longer term of connecting with data from other sources and even just that, it’s pretty exciting and it’s going to happen in the next three years. We are trying to accelerate that by putting what we’re building in the last few years on the web as open source with Sirius Web. We’ll see how the community, well, use it. I’m pretty sure I’ll be surprised. I always like to be surprised by such things.
Federico Tomassetti: Yeah. Nice. About the future, your company is a strategic member of Eclipse. I would like to ask you what future do you see for Eclipse and for EMF.
Cédric Brun: Well, there are lots of interesting things happening in the Eclipse ecosystem. We have quite a few vendors, companies working on cloud based tools and so on, which are gathering in Eclipse because it’s such a great place to collaborate. The rules are clear. The IP management is clear. Well, everybody can collaborate on that, on technologies and yet, compete on the market and that’s pretty useful for companies. Also, the Eclipse Foundation is moving and opening a branch in Europe. It’s pretty exciting for the European company because it means we get more visibility and it’s going to be easier to be part of this consortium in Europe. It’s currently being noticed by Europeans, organizations and so on. It means more members, more members means more areas we could collaborate on, on the technologies through Eclipse.
Federico Tomassetti: Yeah. Is that more specifically about Obeo? What are the future plan that you see? What are the markets that you find more interesting? We discussed the fact that you recently open the office in Vancouver. Obviously, you are growing internationally, but is there any authored direction or anything else that you can share about the plans?
Cédric Brun: Well, in term of market, there’s the whole activity around MBSE is pretty interesting because it’s still a market which is structuring itself. It’s not a blank area, but an area where lots of system engineers are discovering and trying to adopt tools and so on. If you look at how people adopted SysML, which is known, but not that great. If you look at the system engineers, you have, maybe, one in 10 which did adopt SysML. With something like Capella, it can, well, grow up to nine others because it’s really so much easier to use and more focused on the actual system engineers needs. There’s lots of potential of growth here. This market is important in North America, in Europe. Now, more and more, also, in South America and in Asia. With lots of uptick and acceleration in Asia, lately, in adopting model based system engineering and this whole ecosystem, which is being built right now around this. It’s pretty exciting from a market point of view.
Federico Tomassetti: Okay. The first 14 years of the company were exciting, probably, also the next 14 years would be plenty of new things and new exciting things.
Cédric Brun: Yeah. Just “moving forward”.
Federico Tomassetti: Well, like the name suggest. Okay. We are in the final minutes. I wanted to ask if there is anything that you wanted to discuss that I didn’t ask or didn’t come up in the conversation.
Cédric Brun: Let me think a bit. I think maybe … Well, maybe you asked about EMF, but I did not answer about EMF. I answered about Eclipse though
Federico Tomassetti: Yeah. Okay.
Cédric Brun: Well, it’s all right. We mentioned, well, Capella and Sirius Web quite abit. I think it’s all right.
Federico Tomassetti: Okay.
Cédric Brun: I don’t see any clear missing point.
Federico Tomassetti: Good. I hope that we manage, at least, to give an introduction, then of course, every one of these topics will deserve a one hour discussion. I think we could speak about Sirius web for one hour, right?
Cédric Brun: Yeah, let’s make it a monthly in every … right.
Federico Tomassetti: That would be nice. Okay. I wanted, also, to ask where people can find more about Obeo and what you suggest they should start looking into.
Cédric Brun: To know about the company?
Federico Tomassetti: About the company and also, your technology, finding out some practitioner or you suggest them to start looking at Sirius web or there are tutorials or material on your website.
Cédric Brun: Well, right now … Well, if you want to discover Obeo as Obeo website, right now, if you want to use the technology, Sirius Web is not going to be the easiest one to start with because we are releasing it next week. It’s going to be published by then, but to give a good idea of what can be done, looking at Sirius and the gallery and also tools that have been built, it’s pretty useful. If you want to look at a very good example of something which has been built on top of Sirius then capitalize there. It’s available for free. It’s open source. It’s a complete tooling environment, which rely on Sirius and EMF and so on for anybody to try and see. That’s something you could envision. If you want to envision what’s going to be with Sirius web, just think about such an area, but completely revamped and with different user experience and easier to adopt.
Federico Tomassetti: Yeah.
Cédric Brun: Yeah. The Obeo and Sirius website would be the places to go and to discover these technologies. We are going to, well, improve also on Obeo, the technologies and there’s a new Acceleo coming up.
Federico Tomassetti: Nice.
Cédric Brun: Well, they said we are in further longing and Acceleo has been updating and updated in others. The new engine, which is going to be presented at the Eclipse con next week also. Lots of good stuff are coming up.
Federico Tomassetti: Good. We will share our feelings in the transcript, but we have now taken over one hour of your time. I would like to thank you very much for this interview because we touched a lot of points that are very interesting. I think your story since buying both from a technical and from a business point of view. Thank you for sharing it.
Cédric Brun: Thank you, Federico. It was a pleasure for me. It was really, really nice to chat with you, really. Thank you again.
Federico Tomassetti: Thank you. Maybe, one day, we will have another one. Yeah. Thank you. Bye.
Cédric Brun: Bye.
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