With respect to not necessarily trusting a larger vendor is mainly because of my personal experience. I have worked with (as consultant) systems from various large vendors and also with home grown systems. And the fact is that so far the teams that support the home grown system are much more dedicated than a large vendor. Which is not so strange, because the home team has only one customer.

Transitioning from a home grown solution (in this case a large system that supports both the engineering, manufacturing and service community) to a standard solution from a large vendor is not going to be easy. The actual users will get less while they still have to do the same work (in our case). So their trust is by default at an all time low. For the management the trust is increased because they feel comfortable with the large vendor.

I think the customer’s truth in Big compagnies is link to the history of the vendors:
“- they have lot of clients, so that limit the risk of having a new problem”,
“- the solution meke its proofs in other compagnies, so risks should not be too high in trusting the solution”…

Furthemore, I am not sure wheather clients trut PLM vendors or their solution… who wants a 1.0 vension? Why V6 Dassault System plateform began to R2009? And I didn’t heard about huge changes in behaviours after Siemens took UGS…

Actually, I would say that both the product and the compagny selling it must gain the customer(management and users) trust.

Reaction time to correct bug or develop new features is reaaly huge, some month at least. This is not necessary the case in smaller structures, that keep their products at a human “manageble” level.

As an example, I am in a compagny rather small compared to main PLM’s vendors and I could experience the changing behaviour on of new (rather big) customer:
1- at the begining, the product has to show it was able to cover the whole wanted features. Everything goes quite normally until a little lack occurs…
2- the customer was then in an “anxious mode”, thinking delay and failure risk was very huge. In this phase, talking can not do so much: one will see the results.
3- after a quick resolution of the problem (2-3 weeks) we could demonstrate the whole functionallity.

The project team was really impress, and I hope I can say now that the customer trust us and our product capabilities…

Best,
Loic

Interesting discussion. Changing PLM vendors is a kind of ‘deep change’ that I wrote about myself in July. excertping…”Trust is both and emotional and logical act. Emotionally, it is where you expose your vulnerabilities to people, but believing they will not take advantage of your openness. Logically, it is where you have assessed the probabilities of gain and loss, calculating expected utility based on hard performance data, and concluded that the person in question will behave in a predictable manner. In practice, trust is a bit of both. I trust you because I have experienced your trustworthiness and because I have faith in human nature.”

Traditionally, we did tend to trust (what we knew of) larger companies. They had demonstrated staying power, capability, and a history of behavior. You had a palpable feel for ‘who’ they were.

Today, that is less true. Where yesterday’s ‘major’ vendors are being gobbled up (e.g. UGS) by ever larger conglomerates, just ‘who’ you are dealing with becomes less clear. And, it seems to be happening more frequently as we move forward. We have all seen what can happen to a product line after a new parent has acquired it.

When it comes to trust, the best you can do is make a decision based on the hear and now. The vendors’ execs you met with last week, giving you a warm and fuzzy, likely won’t be around in 24 months. If they are, its an equal likelihood they’re in a new role unable to effectively influence prior commitments they may have made to you.

Google vs. Microsoft? How do you ‘trust’ either organization? When your own company, even if you’re a Fortune 100, expenditures are but a drop in their annual revenue bucket, how committed do you think -they- are to you?

Cheers,

JT…