Francis Bernard is an Executive Advisor for market development to the management team at ParallelGraphics. He is a founder of Dassault Systemes which became a worldwide leader with prestigious references in the aerospace as well as the automotive industries, in Americas, Europe and Asia.
After graduating from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace in 1965, Mr. Bernard joined Dassault Aviation in 1967 as a theoretical aerodynamics engineer. There, he specialized in the theoretical definition of aircraft and established a CAD/CAM department where he launched CATIA in 1977, the first 3-D designing system of its kind. In 1981, Mr. Bernard set up Dassault Systemes, a subsidiary created by Dassault Aviation to further develop CATIA, and was appointed President.
Under his direction, Dassault Systemes established a partnership with IBM to market CATIA worldwide and extended considerably the functionalities of CATIA, which evolved from its first version, dedicated to a limited set of 3-D applications for aircraft design, into a modular and open architecture capable of integrating a large number of leading-edge applications. Dassault Systemes became in the early 90s, a worldwide leader with prestigious references in the aerospace as well as the automotive industries, in Americas, Europe and Asia.
The company grew from its original 20 employees to more than 1,000 employees in 1995 and 7,000 employees in 2006. Mr. Bernard retired from Dassault Systemes at the end of 2006.
Mr. Bernard was honored with the 1997 Award from the French Académie Nationale de l’Air et de l’Espace, as well as by the Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine and the National Air & Space Museum of the USA as being the “inventor of CATIA."
Born in Hanoi, Vietnam, Mr. Bernard currently resides in Paris with his wife, Solange.
