SolidWorks and Data Management… Meh?

Long time ago, I had a conversation with former CEO of SolidWorks John McEleney, who said – data-management pain is what slow down every SolidWorks deal. By the way, I still agree with John – along all these years, SolidWorks was very careful with regards to what data-management technology (PDM, PLM) is used by SolidWorks customers and sold by SolidWorks partners. Both PDM products SolidWorks used to have (and still selling with SolidWorks) are PDM Works Workgroup and Enterprise PDM are the result of acquisitions. SolidWorks selected these products carefully after ensuring that products fit customer needs.

Who is doing SolidWorks PLM today?

There quite many companies these days selling PDM/PLM solutions for SolidWorks. You can see them all on the listSolidWorks Partners (filter for Data Manageemnt and PDM / PLM). Some interesting development was done recently by Aras PLM providing product called EPLM and connected to SolidWorks Enterprise PDM. Read my previous post – Aras, SolidWorks and Disrupting PLM strategies.

SolidWorks and Big Dassault Brother

SolidWorks (oops… Dassault Systems SolidWorks Corp) has deep roots and connection with PLM technologies developed by Dassault and specifically Enovia. Back in 2010 we’ve seen the announcement of SolidWorks claiming development of new products based on Enovia V6. Earlier in 2011, SolidWorks released n!Fuze – first product to do some work between SolidWorks and V6. However, this product was far from full-blown PLM system. You can read my previous post about that – SolidWorks n!Fuze: The Cloud Remake of PLM Collaboration?

SolidWorks World 2012 PLM partners

Who is exhibiting PLM-related stories at SolidWorks World 2012? I found classification of partners is a bit confusing (which is not surprising in PDM / PLM domain). The relevant categories are Data Management, PDM, PLM, Data Interoperability.

Interesting enough, there are only two (!) companies listed in PLM category in SolidWorks partner’s pavilion – Dassault System (link leads us to www.3ds.com) and Kenesto. Kenesto is a new company focusing on Process Management for manufacturing. (disclose – I’m on the advisory board of Kenesto). The CEO of Kenesto, To say that Mike Payne, Kenesto CEO is well-known in CAD industry is probably equal to say nothing (:)). More about Kenesto will be coming later on my blog. Nine companies listed in PDM category (including SolidWorks and Dassault Systems). I’ve seen most of them from the previous years. CIDEON America, Inc., keytech GmbH, MechWorks, SofTech, Inc., SolidPartners, Inc., Synergis Software, xPLM GmbH. Six companies listed as data management. Among them, Aras PLM is clearly PLM vendor. I have to mention Inforbix (disclosure – I’m co-founder). Inforbix provides applications helping people to access product data located in many enterprise systems (e.g. PDM, PLM, ERP) and files (CAD, Excel, PDF).

Separately, you need to take a look on companies providing consulting and implementation services in the manufacturing domain. At the same time, these companies are selling software they develop. In many cases, it is hard to differentiate between software and services they sell. Here is the list of companies from the list of presenters associated with PLM:Datafrond, Infotech Enterprises, Razorleaf Corporation, Zero Wait-State. I hope to learn more about what they offer this year and report on my blog.

Why SolidWorks PLM becomes attractive?

There are few factors that potential can make PLM for SolidWorks story attractive these days. First of all – PLM is getting traction. Five years ago, when you talk with people about PLM, you might be hearing "why" question. These days, the question you can hear is "how?". I think it makes a difference between 2007 and 2012. Another aspect is a competitive landscape. Long time SolidWorks rival Autodesk is coming to PLM. As you probably read before on my blog, Autodesk is about to release their Nexus PLM on the cloud very soon. In my view, it creates another level of pressure on SolidWorks execs and an opportunity for customers to come with compelling SolidWorks PLM story.

What is my conclusion? I expect to have more conversation about PLM and SolidWorks in coming days. Stay tuned to my blog and twitter. I’m looking forward to giving you more information and updates about what will happen in coming days in San-Diego.

Best, Oleg

This acquisition is definitely come to balance Oracle’s rival SAP, which acquired SuccessFactor for 3.4B. SuccessFactors, based in San Mateo, Calif., is a big maker of cloud-based human resources applications. The company focuses on applications for managing relationships with employees, such as organizing and developing performance reviews and bonuses. The company says it has more than 3,500 customers. It lost 12.5 million on 205.9 million in revenue last year.

Another interesting acquisition just came out to press few days ago, and it is actually in CAD/PLM space. Dassault is acquiring Netvibes. Netvibes is a website for dashboards. Netvibes, the San Francisco–based company that allows people and brands to create personalized RSS and social media feed dashboards. The dollar amount is incomparable, but the trend is clear, in my view. Cloud assets become interesting.

In my post few days ago, I was discussing PDM/PLM evolution. You can read more by navigating to the following link. This picture will give you an idea of my thinking of where PDM/PLM evolution is going – to the cloud.

However, I think my post was missing one picture, which explains the final step. Please take a look on the picture below. Here is my point – moving actually CAD on the cloud will be the final step.

What is my conclusion? I want to stress this point – CAD will be the latest application in the list of PDM, PLM and other business services to move to the cloud. What is interesting to me is how vendors are going to support this "cloud transition". Companies clearly won’t be able to move all in a single shot. So, we can expect a long time when cloud and on-premises application will co-exist. That drive me to another discussion… tomorrow. I’m taking off to SolidWorks World. Follow my tweeter and watch my blog from time to time. SolidWorks World coverage with "spicy PLM flavor" is about to begin.

Best, Oleg

PLM: Mobile-optimized Sites vs. Mobile Apps

PLM vendors followed technological and consumer trends to develop mobile applications. It sounds as a very important strategy these days, which cause huge interest from companies, users, analysts and industry watchers. Taking into account the long development cycle of enterprise applications and speed of adoption in manufacturing domain, I think software companies better have been not only short – term, but some longer-term development strategy that will allow them to jump to the next trend when it comes. For the moment, let’s rock available PLM mobile apps on iTunes app store and Android Market.

Visiting PTC HQ: Social Link, AnyBOM, Mobile and more…

You are probably familiar with statements “beavers do what beavers do”. Don’t expect beavers to build PLM. Beavers build dams. So, PTC is a “beaver type” company. PTC builds Product Lifecycle Software. Don’t expect them to build something else. They will talk to you about CAD, BOM, Parts, Assemblies, Configurations. The biggest question – will PTC shake the industry with Creo – is still not answered, in my view. They are clearly moving towards that goals. However, the speed is important.

Future PLM platforms and SAP / Oracle technological wars

The complexity of enterprise PLM software is skyrocketing. PLM products are running on proven, but outdated platforms. My hunch – all major PLM vendors having some future technology platform projects on their back-burner. I don’t know if it comes as Enovia V7, TeamCenter Future or Creo Enterprise. What is clear to me is that PLM companies need to come with the next technological platforms to leverage last 10 years development of web and consumer space. Otherwise, they will be dismissed by newcomers. ERP vendors such as Oracle and SAP also keep stakes in this enterprise software game and need to be watched carefully by PLM players.

PLM and the evolution of integration

I think, integration will become even more important soon. There are two main reasons for that. 1- companies are looking how to deliver business solutions faster. To create three years integration project is not an option anymore. Information availability for decision making or cross-department optimization becomes a top priority for IT. 2- cloud. Many companies are checking how to deliver hybrid on-premise/cloud solutions. To take data exchange to cloud won’t an option any more. Future data federation will introduce new web technologies to PLM integration space.

Aras Corp: Different PLM and new open office

I found Aras more focused on the competition with major PLM suppliers – TeamCenter, Enovia and Windchill than before. To me, it is good and bad signs at the same time. It is presents the level of maturity of Aras platform and solutions – it is interesting to see how emerging platform like Aras can compete with mature products coming from large top 3 PLM vendors. Even so, I’d like to hear more about Aras community. I found some community examples such as “feature roadmap voting” interesting. However, I haven’t seen any public numbers about how Aras community is growing. Strong community base can become a much stronger competitive factor for Aras than a feature by feature comparison with TeamCenter and other PLM vendors.

For those of my friends and colleagues, who is San-Diego bound, I’m looking forward to seeing you during SWW 2012.

Best, Oleg

…a client was looking to have a marketing company take its point-of-sale (POS) data to prepare email campaigns. Upon closer review of the contracts, data ownership was ambiguously defined and nested in three separate areas: the Master Services Agreement (MSA), SOW, and an addendum. When you trace the definition through the various documents, the only thing made clear on data ownership was that the campaigns resulting from the ETL (extract, transform, load) process were owned by the client. What about the POS data that was sent over to the marketing services company?

This example made me think about multiple cases when manufacturing companies as well as outside companies such as suppliers, service providers and many other entities can create an interesting value from the combination of the data owned by them – product information, sales information, contracts, customer data, etc. Imagine PLM software will be able to combine these pieces of data into valuable assets.

What is my conclusion? I think PLM has an opportunity to convert data into valuable assets. I can see more companies adopting PLM these days. Cloud PLM will provide an additional opportunity to connect data coming from multiple sources – supply chain, subcontractors and customers. Sounds like an important topic and cool opportunity. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Cloud, Unification and Integration

I can define three things that will lead future evolution in PDM / PLM. It is unification, integration and cloud. I wrote about Unification and Integration few months ago. Navigate to the following article – From PDM to PLM: Unify or Integrate? to have a sense of this topic. The reality of manufacturing companies today are that they have lots of different software packages implemented. Siloed approach was dominant in the last two decades. The question of how to move forward to the next level is actively debated by many software vendors and customers. One of the options is to move to unified systems. When it sounds like an interesting option to cut cost of integration, the overall cost of migration stops many companies from taking this approach. On the other side, affordability of cloud-based software sounds like a good reason to move one and offer new type of solutions with a fraction of cost.

4 Steps of PDM / PLM evolution

In my view, cloud (private and public) will be playing a key role in the evolution of future PDM/PLM systems. On the diagram below, I pictured how I see the evolution of PDM /PLM systems. Four steps show how I think systems will be migrating from pure “on-premises’” solution to full cloud adoption.

PDM / PLM Evolution

I wanted to bring 3 factors that will become critical to define vendor’s success in this evolution – cloud/on-premises balance, system integration and file content migration to the cloud. Let me talk separately about each of these factors.

Cloud / On-Premises balance

The adoption of new technologies and products is very slow. Because of that, manufacturing companies will have to balance long time between existing and new solutions. The ability of vendor to bring systems gradually to solve real business needs in an affordable way, will be a key to success. Nobody will be able to replace all systems in a single shot.

System integration

I’ve been stated it many times already, but again, the ability to integrate cloud and on-premises solution will be another key capability. Today, the integration is very messy. It is costly and, in most cases, causes data duplication with a lot of inefficiency. The ability to build linked data grid of integrated solutions will create a competitive advantage for software vendors to introduce new PDM / PLM solutions and minimize implementation cost.

File Content migration

The absolute majority of product information such as CAD data is located on premises today. With the introduction of new solutions, this content will have to migrate to cloud in order to become available also for people (globally) as well as to be re-used by different cloud and on-premises solutions. The effectiveness of this migration is another key factor to success.

What is my conclusion? I see next 10 years of PDM / PLM evolution as a very interesting time. Old technologies and software packages will retire and new will be coming. What will be the future of PLM platforms is an interesting question. This question needs to be answered by well established PLM vendors like Dassault, Siemens, PTC and by newcomers such as Autodesk. Smaller companies will innovate to provide PLM solutions and technologies that potentially can disrupt and, at the same time, provide a competitive advantage to future evolution of PDM / PLM platforms. What is your take? Speak your mind, please…

Best, Oleg

History and PLM Architecture

Aras Corp. is probably the newest PLM software created from the scratch back in 2001. Top 3 major PLM systems were created as a result of multiple mergers, acquisitions and additional development. It doesn’t say anything about what system is better. However, coming later to the game provides some clear advantages – learning from previous mistakes and use of advanced technology.

PLM functional architecture

This is my simplified view on PLM functional architecture. It can be applied to many PDM/PLM systems developed for the last two decades (actually, it can be applied to non-PLM systems too). Almost all PLM systems were built on top of RDBMS (the exception known to me was MatrixOne, which runs on object database – Objectivity, but migrated to Oracle later). A very essential layer is ORM (Object Relation Mapper) converting RDBMS into object store and providing the data model to build PDM/PLM applications. The characteristics on ORM are important and define the level of flexibility and basic functional capabilities. Business layer (API) and applications and solutions introduced functionality of the system, including core functions, integrations with desktop and enterprise systems as well as many others.

PLM functional architecture

Almost all PDM/PLM systems passed the trajectory of development started from the so-called “toolkit” to “solutions” with many intermediate stations. This is a place where commonality ends. Different vendors put their own functional priorities as well as specific technological and implementation choices.

At the same time, I would define ORM as one of the core capabilities of every PDM/PLM system to provide an engine to implement multiple functions. In many cases, the capability of ORM defines so called “data modeling” capabilities. It is important to differentiate technological capabilities and marketing buzzwords. One of the characteristics of ORM is to use a certain level of RDBMS capabilities can be a differentiation. RDBMS (e.g. Oracel and MS SQL) is a very mature technology. DB vendors developed highly sophisticated mechanisms to support multiple data modeling capabilities. To use a right combination of RDBM data modeling can impact significantly future capabilities of PLM system.

What is my take on Aras?

In general, I don’t think Aras’ principle architecture is different from Enovia, TeamCenter and Windchill. The implementation technique can vary, but it will deliver most of the functions available in other PDM/PLM systems. On the other side, devil is in details. Coming late to the game (around 2000), Aras had a chance to learn from many mistakes made by PDM/PLM vendors during 1990s. It is an important advantage of Aras. I’ve seen lots of focus on flexibility and efficiency, which can create implementation differentiations and potentially lead to the advantages in implementation and maintenance cost. However, these things are hardly can be visible by just reviewing architecture and can be only proven by real work.

What about other players?

I can see some similarity between Aras architecture and Enovia V6, TeamCenter and Windchill. Aras claims to be lean compared to other systems, I can see some reasons why. At the same time, these claims cannot be taken in a broad range and requires detailed discussion. I found some similarity between Aras and MatrixOne (both companies were founded around I-495 in MA ). One more vendor to be mentioned here – Autodesk. We don’t have official detailed information about what is inside of Nexus PLM. It will be interesting to get inside of Nexus technology and see it (as soon as Nexus PLM will be released).

What is my conclusion? PLM architecture influences two major characteristics of the system – flexibility and cost of change. Vendors understand it. You can see different marketing terms here – dynamic modeling, insanely configurable, etc. There are no direct dependencies between how each element of architecture impact flexibilty and cost of change. At the same time, overall, it does matter. In modern PLM world, these two things will drive future success of PLM systems and vendors. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Freebie. Aras marketing wasn’t involved, and no censorship was applied to the content of this post.

Non-systematic definition of GrabCAD

I had a chance to look over what GrabCAD is doing and posted about them on my blog before – The Future of Engineering Communities and Manufacturing Crowdsourcing and Cloud PLM opportunities. Take few minutes to read and make your opinion. Deelip Menezes was describing what his opinion about the future of GrabCAD. He was consulting GrabCAD back in 2010. Here is an interesting passage from Deelip’s blog:

To put it simply, GrabCAD is a free online CAD library, not very different from other online CAD libraries. But the CAD library is only a first step. Pretty soon, GrabCAD will evolve into an online Engineering marketplace where members will be able to post Engineering projects and other members will be able to bid on them…GrabCAD will have an eBay style rating system where a member can start building his “reputation” by fulfilling projects, uploading his personal models for others to download and use, etc.

Hardi Meybaum explains GrabCAD using words “Crowdsourcing and Open-Engineering”. Navigate to the following presentation to learn more. In my view, it confirms plans of GrabCAD to develop future online applications in the field of engineering and manufacturing. You can think about Facebook apps applied to CAD domain. It obviously brings lots of questions related to IP – copyright, reuse and many others that needs to be handled on time.

DMCA and Engineering IP

I can see Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is one of the fundamentals of online business when it comes to Copyright protection. History already created few examples when companies protected their work using DMCA. Among them, there is a famous Google-Viacom and some other cases. At the same time, I never heard about application of DMCA to the field of CAD models, engineering IP and some cases discussed in Dezignstuff blog.

Respect Engineering Community

From my experience, engineers are special kind of people. In the past, SolidWorks developed a very successful community that respects engineers and their work. That’s why we had a chance to see so many SolidWorks works online – blogs and shared online materials. You cannot see such amount of online work related to other CAD systems. GrabCAD is actually proven in GrabCAD’s infographic:

To respect engineers is one of the fundamental thing that can create a successful engineering and manufacturing community. Last changes in GrabCAD that allows you toreport this model and upload notification shows that GrabCAD is listening. At the same time, in my view, it happened very reactively.

What is my conclusion? Future engineering environment will be different from what we see now. It will be driven by new technologies and business opportunities. It will take time to develop them as well as to adjust existing legal definitions. Clearly, GrabCAD is trying to innovate in this space. Future development of GrabCAD depends on many factors and events. It looks like a fast drive on a narrow path between IP of engineers and manufacturing companies, legal rules and business interests. As we know from the history of the internet, driving fast can bring you a speed ticket . Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Freebie. GrabCAD didn’t pay me to write this post.

Today we are adding additional flexibility to EC2 instances running in the Virtual Private Cloud. First, we are teasing apart the IP addresses (and important attributes associated with them) from the EC2 instances and calling the resulting entity an ENI, or Elastic Network Interface. Second, we are giving you the ability to create additional ENIs, and to attach a second ENI to an instance (again, this is within the VPC).

On the picture below you can see how Amazon explains the topology of EIN.

Cloud PLM

There are two CAD / PLM vendors officially announced their support for cloud – Autodesk and Dassault. Nexus 360 PLM is a cloud PLM coming from Autodesk later this year. Dassault ENOVIA is a flagship product sold by Dassault. Another PLM company claims their support cloud is Aras Corp. I haven’t heard any specific cloud plans from Siemens PLM and PTC. If you’re in discussion with your CAD / PLM vendor these days, you better check if product cloud configuration supports EIN.

What is my conclusion? Even the article is a bit on a technical side, I found it quite important. Cloud is moving towards having more and more “enterprise features”. This is a reaction of cloud providers on the coming demand from enterprise IT to accept cloud usage. The critical question that wasn’t answered was about the cost. Cloud attractiveness is dependent on cost structure. Cloud providers will have to charge an additional fee for enterprise features. Will it be still attractive for company IT? A big question. The architecture of cloud systems is in a very early beginning phase. You better check it carefully with your vendors and/or partner. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

It takes time, but economic of cloud computing is too good to be ignored by CIO. At the time consumer market already embraced cloud computing via multiple store (but not only) options like Dropbox etc., CIOs are just coming to discover it. Navigate to the following Gigaom article – CIOs come around to cloud storage. Here is my favorite passage:

“The sheer volume and availability needs are pushing cloud storage to the forefront,” he said. They have to look at the economics of cloud compared to the high-cost, high-maintenance data center storage model, he said… In short, even the most risk-averse C-level information executives are coming to realize that if cloud storage isn’t in their current plan, it will be in the near future.

At the same time, I can hear voices of customers and vendors about the fact cloud computing is still confusing. So, in today’s post, I decided to put some practical technological options about how PLM (and not only) can be delivered on cloud today from the technological standpoint.

Amazon

Amazon is Amazon. Flexible, public, cloud. Period. It is a perfect virtual environment with dollar meter. You pay for what you use. Despite few outages, AWS is pretty stable and can provide you a reliable base as a platform for cloud PLM. Most of PLM vendors talking these days about cloud are exploring Amazon as a first option. Amazon also provides probably the best shortcut between existing PLM architectures and future cloud models.

Microsoft Azure

Azure is a different type of cloud animal. If you’re familiar with terminology, Azure is PaaS (opposite to AWS, which is IaaS). I can see many advantages of Azure. It is single development platform, tools, multi-language support. Another positive side of Azure is that Microsoft can much easier force developers follow specific rules that can prevent application from misbehave. The perception of vendors and developers is that Azure is closed platform. I’m not saying it is true, but this is what I think many people assume when they think about "Azure cloud".

OpenStack

This is a very interesting option. OpenStack pretends to become "an Android of the cloud". Open Stack achieved critical mass to become a reality. OpenStack is IaaS environment currently supported by Rackspace and NASA. Technologically, OpenStack is a combination of storage and computing library. The easiest way to start with OpenStack is to use it onRackspace. OpenStack objective is to convert cloud into commodity, which can be beneficial for many consumers of the technology. I can see an interesting option for OpenStack and PLM. OpenStack provides a very open and economic way to establish mini-cloud centers. It can be a foundation for cloud services available for large companies having concerns about public cloud.

Cloud Databases

This is an interesting option for PLM developers. Fundamentally, PDM/PLM is all about a database today. To move PLM database on the cloud, can be an interesting option. Read my post few months ago – Will Database on the cloud supercharge PLM for Small Companies? There are few providers to be mentioned here. I’d be starting from Amazon RDS. Another option is to use databases services created by enterprise software vendors – Oracle Cloud Databases,Salesforce.com Database and few others.

Don’t Forget IBM big blue

Big Blue IBM is also going to the cloud. However, IBM is doing it differently. It called IBM Smart Cloud. You can learn here about how IBM suggests to use these services here. In a nutshell, IBM idea is to wrap whatever you have with Tivoli cloud services. IBM is attacking cloud from a software perspective and looking how to build a cloud umbrella beyond your existing data center. IBM clearly is looking how to attract "enterprise dollars" from AWS, OpenStack and Azure.

What is my conclusion? I believe we can see lots of misunderstandings with the cloud computing in a near future. CAD / PLM vendors and service providers will be able to balance in order to dance on both sides of the solutions – on premise and on the cloud. Understanding of technological options is a good foundation towards reasonable decisions about the cloud in 2012. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

I was reading ECN article Seeing Past the Clouds – PLM and what’s What? by Eric Marks. The article is speaking about trends in the cloud PLM and four possible strategies: public, private, community and hybrid. I can clearly understand the difference between public and private (read one of my previous posts – PLM Cloud: dedicated, private, public). However, the concept of community cloud is a bit complicated, since it is point on how cloud services will be used, rather on if it goes to public servers and multitenant opposite to private server placement. At the same time, I found the passage about "hybrid cloud" the most interesting. Here it is:

And lastly there are “hybrid clouds” where a private cloud can extend onto a public cloud for specific activities and on an as-need basis. The benefit of a hybrid approach that incorporates a public cloud is that it provides extra performance scalability for the private cloud that would be in use.

I can clearly see how it can make a difference. I’m sure you’re familiar with Basic Instinct movie. Let me make an association with IT. The basic IT instincts are control and cost. As I’ve been told by IT people in one of the manufacturing companies in Mid West – if the cloud is be more cost-effective for effective for us, we will be moving towards the cloud. Otherwise we stay in our racks. Hybrid model allows to keep IT on premise and extend to cloud in order to have a cost effective expansion and scale. It sounds like something that can keep everybody happy and, at the same time, it is clearly Trojan horse that cloud providers will put in organizations. As soon as such solutions will be running in production, rest of the game for cloud providers will be to leverage the economy of scale and not to blow up "security" red-herring.

Another passage from ECN article practically confirms that.

According to Edward Quinn, Mevion Medical Systems IT Manager, “to do this, Mevion is leveraging a “hybrid cloud” in order to be able to scale quickly and efficiently to distributed cloud data centers at far less cost than purchasing expensive equipment or renting/building out corporate data centers. The IT department can leverage the advanced international infrastructure already in place by leading cloud computing companies and activate and pay only for the services that its business needs.”

What is my conclusion? There are many reasons why companies can decide to move towards the cloud – better collaboration, ease of install, mobile, and many others. However, the cloud fundamental is about how to drive costs down using the economy of scale. PLM won’t be an exclusion from this game. In order to move towards that, vendors need to pass "IT police" in every organization. Hybrid cloud looks like a good weapon leveraging IT basic instincts. Just my thoughts….

Best, Oleg