Marketing and the future of PLM Art

April 5, 2012

One of the unpublished rules of PLM Think Tank is not to talk about marketing. Marketing is a tough job. Especially, when it comes to PLM space. The high level of diversification is a nature of every product development organization. The nature of marketing is to invent a story that convincing you to buy a product or solution. These two normally contradict. For those of your who following PLM marketing for the last decade can confirm – it is probably the funniest place in the world. Zillions of buzzwords, thousands of power point decks, videos and flyers.

I stumbled over something interesting yesterday. Have you heard about International Visual Communication Association? No? Me neither. Nevertheless, the tweet message by Bruno Delahaye prompted that his ENOVIA film won Silver Award at IVCA 2012.

Navigate to the following link to see the list of all winners. The film name is Enovia – Your World in Formation. Get cup of coffee and enjoy this 3.5 minutes of PLM drama including – idea, action, characters, language, music and… PLM spectacle.

What is my conclusion? Actually, I enjoyed the video. Is there any practical relation to PLM? Nah… I don’t think so. Any collaboration platform can be used for the same purpose. To me, it was a first evidence you can just enjoy PLM marketing. PLM Art in action. Just my thoughts… Excellent job, Bruno. Thanks for the video and congratulations!

Best, Oleg

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DSCC 2011: Thinking Inside Dassault PLM Box

November 10, 2011

I spent my last two days attending Dassault System Customer Conference (DSCC 2011) in Las Vegas. It will take some time to digest and re-think everything I learned. Today, I wanted to provide you some of my initial thoughts about what I’ve seen and heard.

PLM Vision: Lifelike + Industry Value

Dassault is embarking into the 4th generation (wave) of PLM vision. The name of the “game” is lifelike experience. Bernard Charles was very expressive when explained about lifelike experience. In a nutshell, you can think about lifelike experience as a move towards the PLM in a form of a video game. However, you will “play with a real stuff”.

I found this vision cool and interesting. It will take a time, in my view, until customers are able to adopt it. Another part of the vision is “a holistic industry value creation platform” presented by a new EVP of industry solutions – Monica Menghini.

Shift from Best Practices to Innovation

Dassault was talking a lot about innovation. In my view, DS step towards innovation is an interesting one. It presented as a game changer and justification of PLM expenses. In the past, PLM companies was very focused on so-called “best practices”. I always had a mixed feeling about “best practices” story. So, finally, DS decided to move out of “best practices” story and approach “innovation. Invited blogger (Stephen Shapiro) was talking about Innovation and Best Practices.

Transition to V6

V6 is here. This is a very strong message you can get listening to all DS presentations. I hope everybody understand, it is still too early to talk about massive V6 adoption, Dassault is carefully discussing this strategic move and all customers and companies that are involved into V6 adoption and migration. The migration story is also important to DS and you can see some investment that was made in this domain.

ENOVIA is a power behind everything

Dassault is presenting ENOVIA V6 as a big deal, the only one “unique online cloud platform”. In the first day, Bernard Charles shared the information about $2B investment into R&D effort that “converge” with all technologies under a single platform available on the cloud. Later today, in a conversation I had with Enovia CEO (Andy Kalambi), he mentioned Enovia a true “multi-tenant” cloud solution. The following slide can give a sense of how Enovia positioned among other DS products.

3DSwYm and Social Innovation

Dassault is speaking a social language too. It is not surprising these days. Earlier today, I had a chance to watch a detailed presentation of 3DSwYm environment and talk to people involved into this product creation. I have to say, in the beginning, 3DSwYm story was very confusing to me. The biggest question I had was “what are main differences between 3DSwYm and other tools such as Facebook, Google+, Chatter, etc. I think, I finally found the answer on this question. To me, 3DSwYm is a logical continuation of Windows File Explorer (don’t jump on me – I will explain :) ). Look on the picture of 3DSwYm environment below.

In a nutshell, I can say – 3DSwYm is a content delivery environment, which has a capability to deliver rich (3D and PLM) content and the ability to be social and engage people with communication. Time ago, when computers just started, “file explorer” played the role of content delivery, since everything was about folders and files (local and networked).

What is my conclusion? Dassault didn’t make any big announcements this year. Nevertheless, I found the overall conference content relatively solid. For my taste, presentations (especially general session) were too high level. However, it was compensated by networking and communicating with other people. The biggest DS challenge remains V6 adoption and finding a way for companies to optimize their transition in this platform. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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From PDM to PLM: Unify or Integrate?

October 31, 2011

Earlier, this year, I post a blog called – Integrated PDM and PLM: Wrong Question? In the beginning, this blog post was inspired by Jonathan Scott’s presentation on SolidWorks World 2011. Aras EPLM announcement last week, made me think a bit more about PDM / PLM trends. The idea of integrating PDM with PLM isn’t new and already had a chance to discuss it before. In some of my previous blogs, I discussed that PDM overall maturity was growing for the last 10 years as well as facts that confirming CAD /PDM software vendors will be searching how to boost their future activities based on existing PDM products. Navigate to the following blog – CAD, PDM and PLM diversity, CAD Data and PLM, Autodesk Vault: Enterprise PDM or PLM? A growing amount of conversations around PDM vs. PLM topics made me think about to possible trends in a future PDM to PLM conversation:

Unify PDM and PLM

This is a path that was taken by large CAD/PLM vendors. You can hear “unification talks” from all mindshare PLM companies – TeamCenter, Enovia V6,Windchill. The arguments used by these vendors are quite simple – let’s reduce the amount of systems, unify and centralize information and “life will be good”. These messages are certainly convincing. In the following video, you can listen to how TeamCenter chief – Steve Baschada is talking about PDM to PLM transition.

Keep PDM and Integrate PLM

This is an opposite approach. For many companies, PDM is a successful project. SolidWorks Enterprise PDM, Autodesk Vault, SolidEdge /TeamCenter Velocity. These are examples of successful PDM systems with proven records of deployments. What if we can take PDM “as is” and integrate PLM products on top of them. Aras presented a case with Aras EPLM. I believe Agile PLM, SAP PLM and some other vendors can think about such an approach. I can see “cloud products” can be proposed on top of existing “on premise” offerings. I remember, Arena Solution tried in the past to have such a type of “integrated offering”.

What is my conclusion? I think, these two trends are going to compete in a very near future. Unification as an old school of PLM will be mostly in a defense mode. Their expansion is limited by a significant cost of transition from existing (PDM) systems to unified new platforms. An alternative can be interesting, in my view. Aras is a first example. More to come. The opportunity here is to keep TCO lower. However, the danger of complex integration between PDM and PLM can make this “trick-or-treating” dangerous. Will Aras and followers are going to get more Halloween candies? I don’t know. Just my thougths… Next time I’m going to talk about PDM to PLM integration challenges.

Best, Oleg

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PLM Platforms and PLM Automotive Future

March 7, 2011

A couple of weeks ago, I posted PLM Platform Wars: Who is Right or Who is Left? The following short article in Dasssault 3D Perspective struck me to think more about the future PLM technologies and innovation. Watch the video and make your opinion.

Kate is asking: “Can the automotive industry build cars of the future with old technology?” In my view, devil is in details. PLM is a bit different from iPad 2. Despite some marketing presentations showing V6 as a PLM 2.0 technology, PLM technologies are not created from scratch every 2-3 years.

PLM Platforms

The notion of a platform in enterprise software is very specific, in my view. When we are talking about software platforms, we often can think about .NET, Java, iOS or similar stuff. Platform is an obvious target for every technology. By achieving the level of a platform, your technology can leverage value of all applications running on top of this platform.

However, the enterprise software created a special notion of “platform” in my view. In such a context, platform always becomes a set of technologies coming out of a specific software vendor successfully created a rich set of applications and dependent products. There are few enterprise software platforms that approached a high level of partner’s software development. However, enterprise platforms are controlling the ability of additional software components to run on top of so called “platform” in a strong way.

PLM mindshare vendors are often using the term “platform”. TeamCenter platform, Windchill platform, V6 platform. In my view, these solutions are more representing a rich set of vertical and horizontal applications rather than a software platform. The core of all these platforms is database-oriented software product. These products are supporting core data modeling capabilities of these platforms. Until the recent time, the integration between these data management components and CAD elements was very weak.

PDM in CAD Innovation

One of the innovations created by Dassault V6 platform was bundling of Enovia V6 (platform) with CATIA technologies. By providing CATIA with RDBMS based data modeling backbone, DS created few very interesting capabilities in management of CAD data as well as product development processes. Other PLM vendors approached a slightly different scenario. At the same time, the recent announcement about PTC Creo came with a definition of something called “common data model”. For me, it is not clear what will be relationships between “common data model” and Windchill platform capabilities.

Do you think combining of PDM and CAD is a fundamental PLM innovation of 2010s? Well, the CAD/PDM integration was always a complicated part of the game. The ability to achieve a successful integration was a critical element in most of CAD/PDM/PLM implementations. The fact PLM vendors decided to solve it by providing tighter bundling between CAD and PDM tools is extremely positive. However, as a result, we are going to see a larger amount vertically integrated product suites. It can make many customers happy. However, the same solution can make a lot of complications in case of companies’ mergers, usage of heterogeneous products, etc.

What is my conclusion? Building large vertically integrated product suites is not a new approach. It can be very successful. However, we cannot mislead ourselves- companies are running heterogeneous application set. In my view, this is a reality. To have the ability to implement a granular solution set, with the intensive support of Open Standards can be a key for a future success. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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