I was reading GIGAOM article Amazon and SAP put All-in-One in the cloud few days ago. According to the article SAP will soon make an appearance on Amazon EC2 cloud. Interesting enough it is connected to the fact almost all software of SAP rival Oracle is already available from the cloud.
Another interesting point is related to the fact Amazon is working to support product customization on the public cloud. It will remove another big barrier for deployment and implementation of enterprise software. Here is a very interesting passage:
The conventional wisdom is that big companies are wary of running ERP and other enterprise applications in a public cloud — because they tend to be quite customized and tied into other applications, which makes them difficult to forklift into the cloud. But Amazon is working to change that perception.
PLM and ERP: cloud race
In the past, CAD / PLM vendors lost the competition of C-level and IT visibility in the organization. PLM was considered as Engineering tools, and it took many years and significant effort to improve this perception (still not accomplish in full, from my standpoint). These days a typical “PLM on the cloud” discussion usually runs in too many questions about cloud PLM viability and security. At the same time, we can see how ERP vendors run their products on Amazon cloud.
PLM and Cloud / IaaS
When Amazon is considered as a definite leader in IaaS race, Aras PLM is thinking differently. During the ACE 2012 conference earlier this month, Aras announced Aras Spectrum – soon to be available on Microsoft Windows Azure platform. You can take a look on my post-ACE conference blog post – Aras PLM, Microsoft Azure and Cloud competition.
Autodesk (new PLM vendor these days) is playing with lots of “cloud toys” in the portfolio. One of the toys is PLM 360 -recently announced “cloud PLM alternative”. It is not clear what IaaS platform is using for their cloud development and deployment, for the moment.
What is my conclusion? Amazon is pushing to the enterprise by supporting major ERP vendors. Autodesk is playing with new cloud offering and probably going to make their IaaS choice later. Microsoft is experimenting with Aras PLM to provide Aras Innovator up and running on Azure Cloud. Dassault, Siemens, PTC… Are you watching?
Normally, I’m trying to avoid the topic of PLM competition. Not very often, readers or attendees at conference are approaching me with the blunt question – what is better? TeamCenter vs. Enovia? Aras or Windchill? My typical answer – there are no “absolute advantages” for a specific PLM system. Enterprise and manufacturing companies are complicated environments. The level of complexity, strategy and current context can create a situation where each specific product will have his own advantages and disadvantages.
However, today, I want to talk about competition from the standpoint of PLM vendor. In other words, what can make PLM vendor competitive strategy more successful? To make this discussion interesting and provoking, I will use some examples of what happened in PLM market for the last 10 years. In the world where PLM buzzwords are getting very similar, I will try to answer on a single simple question – what can make PLM vendor competitive nowadays?
I can see four major strategies that can be used by vendors – discontinuity, marketing and branding, partnership and competitor’s mistakes. These are not specific characteristics for PLM companies and can be used for everybody. However, I will try to fill them with PLM context.
Discontinuity
Enterprise software is a complicated beast. PLM cannot be excluded from that list. It is complex, requires long time planning and implementation cycle. Once implementation it works for a long time, replacement cost is high too. Add to this last 10 years of acquisition in this field and large vendor platform transformation and you will have a perfect place to play with discontinuity. Formally, nobody is discontinuing PLM/PDM products. Pro/PDM, Eigner, SmarTeam, Metaphase – all these products are supported and maintained by vendors on a certain level. Practically all PLM vendors are building a support network to deal with customers running outdated and retired systems. Therefore, these customers can become a strategic asset for competitors that will be able to propose them an interesting offer. Once the decision made, to change it will be even more complicated because of long processes, politics and corporate ego. Therefore, discontinuity play can be powerful and dangerous.
Partnership
To have good partners in business is like to have good friends in your life. If you have trusted and powerful partners, you can use it as an advantage in your competitive war. In PLM business, I can see two types of strategic partnership – service and sales channel partner (eg. IBM was such for many years in business with Dassault Systems), the parent company (eg. Siemens for Siemens PLM) or another business division (eg. SAP, Oracle, Microsoft). To develop and keep right partnership is very important. To know how to drop partnership is also one of the elements of a competitive game.
Marketing
To build a perfect marketing and branding story is another way to beat competition. Yes, I know… you are smiling and maybe even thinking – who is buying marketing PowerPoint presentations these days. Believe me or not, it happens all the time. If you are powerful and strong brand with billions of dollars in revenue, your marketing story can be very compelling. It will take time, resources and effort to sort it out. Yes, you are in danger to buy a dream. But it can be a very nice and well packed marketing. So, take it seriously. It can be 3D Experience, High Definition PLM, Instant On – dreams is an important weapon too.
Competitor’s mistakes
Last, but not least- the mistakes (or in this context – presents) made by your competitors. You need constantly and permanently watch your competitors. Low quality of a release, compatibility failure, channel problem – all these mistakes are weapon in your arsenal to build your marketing expansion.
What is my conclusion? The PLM competitive landscape becomes more dynamic than before. I can see some movements done by large companies (eg. Autodesk), smaller established companies with very innovative strategies (eg. Aras) and startup companies. As I said in one of my previous posts – PLM is a fun place again. Just my thoughts…
Let’s talk nuts and bolts today. APIs.. If you think about any PDM / PLM implementation, the question about API is one of the most important. Why so? Because you know – it is near to impossible to get all done out of the box and via configuration. Even if marketing advertised and sales promised, you will have to have something to be done behind the scene using this magic word API.
PLM Openness
The topic of openness comes very often these days. I’ve been posting about openness about a year ago -PLM and New Openness. Notable news around PLM Openness is coming these days around so-called “Codex of PLM Openness” introduced by ProSTEP iViP. Navigate to the following link and you discover that majority of PLM vendors, including big-three-PLM (Dassault, PTC andSiemens PLM) are committed. Yesterday, during the opening session of annual Siemens PLM user conference – PLM World 2012 in Las Vegas, the topic of PLM Openness came into many conversations and even was captured by Siemens PLM blog.
Enterprise Systems and APIs
Enterprise systems have long history of API development. If you spent enough time in your life with databases and enterprise business you probably remember horrible stories of proprietary databases, move to SQL, hope of XML, believe in SOA / Web Services latest dreams about REST APIs. Last week, I came to a very interesting blog trilogy from CloudAve blog about enterprise architecture, APIs and more called – Simple Service Enterprise part 1, part 2, part 3. It is a bit long, but I recommend you to have a read. The following picture was resonating to my thoughts related to PLM implementations and APIs:
Here is my favorite passage that I’d apply to product lifecycle management and many other enterprise implementations:
…the fundamentals of information interchange: exposing business functionality, currently encapsulated in the back-end, to the outside world via services. These services are a one-to-one translation to back-end functions, which are one-to-one translations to business process steps themselves: the smallest level of business transaction.
Implementations, API and Open Data
Here is the idea how I see the future of open APIs. PLM system(s) is holding hostage of data and responsible for a set of process and transactions. Since PLM system cannot live in a vacuum, the interaction of PLM system with other systems in the enterprise (including various B2C and B2C services) is driven by processes. In order to have a productive API, you need to expose these processes using an appropriate level of granularity, including semantics of data (in this context, thinking about resources seems to me as an appropriate way). Having such a level semantically-resource-oriented-APIs can provide an easy and open way to interact with PLM system to build the most effective services.
What is my conclusion? To build a good API is a very complicated task. To make Open API is even harder. I can see a potential in exposing both semantics of data and related system functions in a way allowing me to use it and accomplish processes automatically. I think, web and REST give us a bit promise. The responsibility of vendors is to develop an appropriate level of granularity to make it usable. Just my thoughts…
BAM…BAM…BAM… My cloud is better than your cloud. Aras PLM made a step into cloud game with a new product called – Aras Spectrum. PLM cloud ecosystem was boring place until last week. Autodesk PLM 360 was practically playing solo “PLM Cloud” game with some additional voices coming from DS made by SolidWorks n!Fuze and n!Volve. DS products are more extension to existing design environments – CATIA and SolidWorks. So, what happened last week?
Aras Spectrum
Last week, during ACE 2012, Aras presented a new cloud PLM strategy and new product – Aras Spectrum. So, what is behind this name? In a nutshell, Aras is partnering with Microsoft Azure team to deliver Aras Cloud PLM solution to mega-customers with high level of scalability and unique Aras cloud strategy. The main point Aras made is related to the reality of the PLM deployment requiring on-site integration between “multiple-clouds”. You can see this point presented on the following slide:
Aras introduces the three-way strategy to deploy Aras PLM on cloud with some mirroring functions on-premises. They called it 1/cloud mirror; 2/failsafe mirror; 3/dual deployment. You can see slides bellow. However, it is still hard to me to understand the difference between these options. What I understood from short conversation with Aras people, these options represent a different mirroring strategy.
Aras strategy is to leverage massive scale of Microsoft Azure platform to reach significant performance and scalability achievements. It includes the ability of Aras PLM to run across the world – wide network on Microsoft Azure data centers, 50,000+ users load test and more…
Which Cloud Better?
Aras is the first PLM vendors that introduce the question of “which cloud better?” to us. Until now, the main message we’ve heard from cloud providers was about how to eliminate the complexity of deployment and IT by using cloud PLM. That was the main message provided by Autodesk PLM 360 – instant on. The difference introduced by Aras is taking us to the reality of on-site customization, which unavoidable as was stated during Aras cloud presentation.
Another point of potential differentiation is cloud infrastructure. Aras is strategically positioned with Microsoft Azure. Autodesk didn’t provide any information so far about data centers and cloud infrastructure they provided. From a very brief public message provided by Autodesk publicly, PLM 360 is a true cloud application:
Autodesk PLM 360 is a true multi-tenant cloud application. Users and managers will never again have to worry about upgrades and broken customization; the application is always up-to-date and compatible with any customer-specific configuration.
Opposite to that, Aras Spectrum is by definition cloud/on-premises solution with some elements of mirroring. Aras is using additional services provided by 3rd party vendors to support so called “Aras Connected Cloud strategy:
What is my conclusion? Autodesk was a first major PLM broadly available on the cloud. However, cloud cannot be ignored these days. Aras Spectrum just confirmed that. Aras Spectrum is not released yet. I’ve heard Aras is talking about July-August 2012 timeframe (still need to be confirmed). However, it is interesting to see different views on how PLM cloud strategy can be implemented. I think, there are enough space to innovate with the cloud solutions, and I’m looking for more news.
Disclosure: As a co-founder of Inforbix, I understand that my opinion about PLM Data and Search can be unintentionally biased. Nevertheless, I believe the topic itself is very important, so I decided to share my thoughts anyway.
PLM Data. A lot of data. You are probably familiar with that. The amount of data is growing. I can say the same about the complexity of the products and product development processes. It creates significant challenges for everybody in the company – designers, engineers, manufacturing, marketing, sales and support. How to overcome the level of complexity and provide customers with easy and intuitive tools? This is one of the challenges I mentioned in my presentation few months ago during AU 2011.
In this article which is going to be unusually long, I’d like to explore trends and show examples of applications specifically focusing on user experience.
TeamCenter Active Workspace
Siemens just released videos and information about so-called TeamCenter Active Workspace. Per my understanding Active Workspace is a first module to implement so-called HD-PLM vision Siemens PLM presented last year. I caught the initial info about Active Workspace was in October 2011. I captured it in my Inforbix blog. The discussion was started on twitter by @dorasmith. In addition, you might be interested to read an early review done by Kenneth Wong of Desktop Engineering. The short definition of Active Workspace was like this “Active Workspace is like Internet search, simplifying PLM complexity”. I was listening to the following video by Chuck Grindstaff of Siemens PLM talking about Active Workspace.
Finally it came to the release. In the following video, you can see a first review of the product.
I find user experience quite comprehensive. In my view, it is clear simplification compared to a traditional PLM environment. According to my understanding Active Workspace is running on top of TeamCenter platform (as a module). So, where it provides a clear user experience simplification, customers still needs to take care of IT, installation and implementation cost.
Dassault System 3DExperience and Exalead SBA
DS has a concern about user experience too. DS started 3DLive product about 5 years ago as an innovative way to collaborate, visualize and navigate through product information. These days, DS is presenting something they call 3D Experience platform that allows people to experience real product in a virtual environment. According to Dassault, it will change the way innovators innovate with consumers. You can see a visionary video below. This is still a vision, in my view.
3D Experience platform contains many elements supported by other DS products. One of them, Exalead is a platform for Search Based Applications. DS acquired Exalead two years ago. Since that time, I’ve heard lots of talks about Exalead as a platform. According to Dassault, Exalead platform and applications can be embedded into other applications or used a platform for building new apps. Known as “French Google”, Exalead was a company founded back in the beginning of 2000 with some core roots in Alta Vista search platform. In my view, Exalead is a powerful toolkit. With all power it comes with, Exalead is a very generic and not related to PLM. In the video below, I found an application developed by DS partner – NovaQuest, which can be positioned as much as close as possible to PLM.
Autodesk PLM 360
The story of Autodesk PLM 360 is just in a very early beginning. Autodesk is presenting PLM 360 as a major breakthrough into changing the way people work in PLM including delivery and implementation (Instant On the cloud) and ending up with a user experience. I presented some of my thoughts about PLM 360 on my blog before. Navigate to the following link to read more. From the standpoint of user experience, PLM 360 is completely browser-based (except of Workflow designer)
It also provides some interesting capabilities for product information navigation.
Opposite to Siemens PLM and Dassault, PLM 360 is running in the cloud. User interface is a strong point of PLM360. It is also very flexible and customizable. At the same time, because of the cloud, connection with the data in the company, remains one of the weak points and the gap that Autodesk needs to cover.
PTC, Windchill and SharePoint
The last version of Windchill product put a lot of focus on the user experience. PTC mentioned it many times in their presentations. You can see a video of Windchill 10 demonstrating all usability enhancements. The core concept of Windchill UI is to combine the best desktop experience with the best web experience. How successful is that? Take a look on the video and tell me, please.
On the side of search, PTC relies on SharePoint infrastructure heavily. In the following video, you can see how PTC mixing SharePoint search with Windchill products.
Inforbix Product Data Applications
The big idea of Inforbix is to change the way how people in manufacturing company can access product data located in disparate locations (file vaults, local computer drives, database, PDM/PLM applications and other sources). Inforbix doesn’t require you to migrate data into a single database. Inforbix runs from the cloud (private or public), scans product data and helps you to search, find connected elements and create different reports and visualization. Learn more here. User experience plays one of the central roles in Inforbix. The following video shows Inforbix Search user experience that helps you navigate and discover product data.
This video presents Inforbix Tables user experience helping you to slice and dice data in virtual reports.
What is my conclusion? User experience is very important these days. What we learned from the internet and mobile space, one “extra click” can kill your product. The new motto – “don’t make me think” can be easy applied as the most important requirements nowadays. The idea of user experience started to proliferate to enterprise space. PLM companies are clearly interested how to make improvements and create new generation of tools, which will not look like ’95 anymore. Just my thoughts….
Few weeks ago, back to my trip to Munich PLM Innovation Congress, I published post - Will Europe Adopt Cloud PLM? Navigate back to my article to listen to the speech by Neelie Kroes, European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda, announcing a European Cloud Partnership help cloud computing through public procurement. Since that time, I started to follow “European cloud” story more closely. The following article caught my attention - Cloud computing ‘made in Germany’ stirs debate at CeBIT. Take five minutes of your time and read this article. It sounds like German IT and specifically Deutsche Telecom is playing an interesting cloud game. Security is a strong point they want to leverage. Here is an interesting passage:
The head of the German communications giant, Rene Obermann, told visitors to the CeBIT this year that “the ‘German Cloud’ could present a competitive advantage for us.”. Having lived through first a Nazi dictatorship, then a Communist one, Germans are especially sensitive when it comes to data protection and Deutsche Telekom hopes to leverage this to its advantage. “In Germany, the data protection laws are very strict. But several operators do not come from Germany and do not adhere to these standards,” said Obermann. He is aiming at the 3.6 million prosperous German small and medium sized firms who have not yet taken the leap to storing their data using cloud computing. Only 12 percent have done so. “It’s an enormous potential,” said Obermann, vaunting the advantage of his firm’s 30 giant servers or “datacenters” across Germany.
It made me think about future cloud PLM potential of German market. Two major CAD / PLM companies are permanent residents in EU - Dassault Systems and Siemens PLM. Dassault has significant cloud ambitions. Earlier last year, during DSCC 2011 event in Las Vegas, Bernard Charles mentioned that DS spent about $2B to develop the best in-class cloud online PLM platform. At the same time, Siemens PLM so far didn’t show up any cloud development and plans. All this happens in parallel with last development of Autodesk PLM 360 and Autodesk’s ambitions to establish themselves as a “Salesforce.com of PLM”.
What is my conclusion? I think, we are in the early beginning of cloud PLM race. As we’ve seen in consumer web, mobile, search and social networking, competitors will be using various tools to protect their interest and establish a better market position for their cloud products. Will “Made in German” sticker become one of them? Time will show. Just my thoughts…
So, this week, I’d like to make a next step and talk about Dassault Enovia and multi-CAD. Again, as before when I talk about Autodesk Vault, my focus is on the integration between PDM/PLM platform and CAD. I’m not focusing on CAD data translation, visualization. Don’t take me wrong- data translation is important. However, I’d like to keep my focus on how data-management platform interact with CAD applications.
A week ago, I sat down with David Segal of Dassault Systemes to talk about Dassault Enovia and MultiCAD. This blog gives you some ideas about how Enovia presents their Multi-CAD integration and openness. He kindly provided me with some slides about Enovia V6 multi-CAD and gave me explanations about how Dassault Enovia supporting different design applications.
In my view, the usual complexity, every CAD/PLM vendor has is about how to separate their own CAD solutions from "other vendor CAD" solutions. Dassault is calling it "authoring applications". So, on the following slide, you can see how ENOVIA V6 chart pictures about data-management strategy. I had hard time to go and understand the difference between "comprehensive collaborative solution" and "collaborative data-management solutions" for MCAD and ECAD. What was important to understand is that Enovia is not limiting their offer to Dassault CAD applications only. In addition, interesting to see that CATIA V6 and SolidWorks are positioned on this slide in the same box.
ENOVIA multiCAD data management
Another aspect is related to mechanical and electronic design applications (so-called MCAD and ECAD). The complexity of products is growing. You can hardly limit yourself to only mechanical aspects of the design. In that context, Enovia V6 supports both MCAD and ECAD spaces. You can see a chart below explaining MCAD solution offering.
MCAD Data Management
Another one related to ECAD options.
ECAD Data Management
I’ve got mixed feeling about these slides. The simple message is clear. Whatever CAD you do have – Enovia supports it. At the same time, what I learned the user experience and functionality of the integration are very important. The level of diversification in design scenarios and practices is very high. So, to see what is supported is something that important to understand. It is always interesting to see some performance in action. Take a look on few videos below for more examples.
NX Collaboration
ProE Collaboration
ProE ECO Implementation
MCAD-ECAD with Cadence
What is my conclusion? I made my short conclusion in the title of the post – Do Everything! I can hardly find the name of design system / CAD not covered by the slides. It is a good sign, since it allows the flexibility for user to choose tools and don’t lock customer on DS tools only. However, don’t take it blind and compare functional details in case you decide to go to one of them. Blog post is a wrong place to make functional comparison, but details are important. Remember that. Moreover, to support different versions of CAD applications is as well important. I can see how Dassault is doing a lot to make ENOVIA capable to be connected to any design applications and looking forward to learning about your experience. Speak your mind…
Best, Oleg
Disclosure: This post was reviewed by David Segal (DS) before publishing.
Cloud is hyping these days. However, it also becomes real and moving from the state of "think" to "make" something. Navigate to the Jim Brown’s post. One of my favorite passages out of that post is following:
Now there is more to do than talk, something can be done about it. There are real, viable options to consider. In the last month: Nuage launched themselves as a new player in the PLM arena; starting with a cloud-based social business collaboration platform and unveiling a strategy to build in PLM-oriented controls. This week, Autodesk launched PLM 360, a cloud based PLM solution. During an analyst call this week, Dassault Systemes announced that V6 adoption is now over 1,000.
There are lots of presence and visibility of Autodesk PLM online these days. Marketing money Autodesk is spending on Google works just perfect. I was reading the TCT online magazine about software technology for product development and manufacturing. Navigate to the following link to read "Autodesk don’t do PLM – they do cloud PLM" article. I found this passage interesting:
Autodesk also claims that it is the first cloud-based PLM solution focused on business applications beyond engineering and bill of material management. As a result, employees in a range of roles – from planning and product development to quality and compliance to service and more – can better access product and project-related information that helps them continuously improve the products they design and manufacture.
Well, "beyond engineering" statement is clear – Autodesk is promoting their strategy to split Autodesk Vault and Autodesk PLM 360. So, Vault by definition is responsible for "engineering work". You can read on Autodesk website: Vault is CAD Data Management Software. However, the statement "beyond bill of materials" is actually something that made me think beyond cloud hype. Bill of Material is the essential piece of business for every manufacturing company. At the end of the day, nobody care about 3D models, but you need to have BOM and Drawings to make things work. Without BOM loaded into manufacturing system you production will be stuck.
So, practical question I want to ask today with regards to any cloud PLM system – Where is my Bill of Material? By trying to answer on this question I want to analyze few systems available in the PLM market.
Arena Solution is primarily focused on Bill of Materials. They see a lot of value to bring BOM on the cloud. According to Arena, it resulted in the ability of all people involved in product development, manufacturing and supply chain processes to be "on the same page" about what is the last updated BOM. So, the answer is – BOM in the cloud.
DS Enovia is a backbone for all systems and processes. Dassault made a step future. Enovia Backbone is managing all information starting for 3D CATIA data ending up with Bill of Materials, suppliers and support processes. So, assume DS Enovia runs in the cloud as claimed by DS, the answer is – BOM in the cloud.
Nuage is a new company. Frankly, not much information is available about Nuage these days. In my conversation with Nuage people, they claimed fully-fledged PLM functionality in the cloud. So, my assumption that the answer on my question "where is BOM?" is following – BOM in the cloud.
Now, let me back to Autodesk’s "beyond bill of material management" passage. From my experiment with PLM 360 earlier this week I learned that PLM 360 knows how to manage Bill of Materials. So, I can assume BOM is in the cloud. On the other side, in many situations Bill of Materials is managed by PDM system like Autodesk Vault In one of my previousposts almost a year ago (Autodesk Vault: Enterprise PDM or PLM?) Vault aims to handle CAD data, mostly.
What is my conclusion? I think, time comes to start asking simple questions about "where is my stuff"? Where is my CAD drawing? Where is my BOM? Where is my ECO? How all these elements can play together, since I need’em to feed my manufacturing/ ERP system and go to production. I believe we need to get better understanding about how Autodesk Vault interplay with PLM 360. I hope Autodesk will demo it soon. The same question goes to all cloud PLM providers. How to integrate data between existing and news systems will become a key question to make cloud PLM successful. Just my thoughts…
I’ve been listening to Marc Halpern‘s presentation Executing PLM Strategy in a Disruptive Business Climate last week during PLM Innovation 2012 Congress in Munich. I found PLM Market Dynamics slide very interesting. However, let me speak about Gartner Magic Quadrants before. Gartner has a long history of Magic Quadrants (MQ) research methodology. For some unknown to me reasons Gartner didn’t publish MQ related to PLM during the last few years. The last one I found takes us back to 2007. What is very interesting is that this MQ doesn’t include any vendors in the quadrants of niche players, visionaries and challengers.
Gartner PLM Magic Quadrant 2007
PLM Market in 2012 is different from Gartner’s MQ circa 2007. Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to discuss it with Marc Halpern in Munich. I’m sure will do it soon. So, the slide Marc presented last week in Munich is below.
This diagram made me think about a very interesting situation we have today in the PLM market. Here are some of my thoughts.
Big PLM money – is it forever?
Top 3 CAD / PLM vendors are making good money these days. We have seen all financial reports went out during the past few weeks. At the same time, PLM vendors’ reliance on large customers becomes very clear to me. Dassault, Siemens and PTC were focused on the convergence of platforms and unification of portfolios. The examples of these activities areTeamCenter Unified, Dassault V6 and PTC Creo. In my view, all major PLM vendors failed to deliver scalable PLM solution for mid-range manufacturing companies and supply chain. This is a contradiction to the dynamics of manufacturing business these days. Manufacturing becomes more distributed and diverse and we see a larger number of small and lean manufacturing companies replacing large behemoths of the past. These companies are very concerned how to build lean and efficient product development practices. And from the standpoint of software, manufacturing companies are looking for a modern approach to PLM.
Large PLM vendors and Small Manufacturing companies
Despite the promises made by Dassault, Siemens and PTC, they didn’t deliver any PLM product to the market of small manufacturing companies. Dassault SolidWorks failed to deliver a full range of SolidWorks Enovia V6 based products,SolidWorks n!Fuze introduced last year was not very successful. During SoldiWorks World 2012 two weeks ago, SolidWorks was talking about n!Fuze V2 to be delivered later this year. PTC shutdown their Windchill ProductPointproduct. Siemens didn’t make any new product delivery in this segment of market for the last 2-3 years.
Autodesk and New PLM
The appearance of the Autodesk in the market of PLM was almost predicted. However, it wasn’t clear what path to PLM Autodesk will take. The development of consumer and web technologies created the situation when PLM on the cloud can be possible. I’m curious to see how Autodesk will keep cloud / on-premises balance in their way towards what I define asfinal step of cloud strategies. There are lots of challenges Autodesk can face before Autodesk PLM 360 becomes “salesforce.com of PLM world”. I’m going to attend Autodesk Media Summit later this month in San-Francisco and looking forward to hearing more about it from Carl Bass.
PLM Perfect Storm
You are probably familiar with the definition of “perfect storm“. Reading from wikipedia ”perfect storm” is an expression that describes an event where a rare combination of circumstances will aggravate a situation drastically. The term is also used to describe an actual phemonenon that happens to occur in such a confluence, resulting in an event of unusual magnitude.
Two arrows on Gartner’s picture between Dassault, Siemens, PTC and Autodesk will form a situation of perfect storm. Today, no company claim they have a guarantied recipe of how to success with PLM at that place.
What is my conclusion? It is an interesting time to be in the PLM market these days. As I wrote in my recent blog -SolidWorks community and opportunity for PLM, there is a significant opportunity to deliver PLM solution to the white space market these days. Gartner’s PLM market dynamics slide is highlighting the same opportunity. It is clearly a perfect storm. Large PLM companies have a lot of money to play the future PLM game. They have a lot to win as well as to lose, in case something will go wrong. Who will take the best “stormy seat” in this game? An interesting question to ask. Just my thoughts…
Earlier this week, I had a conversation with engineering IT manager of a manufacturing company. Without mentioning names, we’ve been discussing how manufacturing companies are adopting technologies in general and PDM/PLM technologies specifically. According to him, software companies largely misunderstood the way manufacturing companies perceive technology adoption. The conclusion we made, was that manufacturing companies are very slow to adopt any technologies. One of the key factors that impacts future evolution of PDM/PLM technologies will cost of implementation and changes. This conversation made me think about what will be the evolution of PDM / PLM systems for coming decades.
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…
Posted by olegshilovitsky 
Few weeks ago, back to my trip to 
Note, this is NOT 1st April post 
. Multi-CAD and PLM. Endless story… Few weeks ago, I published my post 
