PLM, Enterprise Search and Aras Strategy

April 27, 2011

I’m attending Aras Community Event 2011 these days in The Henrly Hotel in Dearborn, MI. You can have more information about new coming from the conference following my tweets on ArasACE. One of the sessions yesterday caught my attention – Enterprise Search Panel. Search is driving more interest in the ecosystem of Product Lifecycle Management and Manufacturing. I posted about enterprise search several times in the past. Navigate your browser to the following links to read my previous posts – PLM and Comprehensive Search, PLM Interest To Enterprise Search, Search Based Application and PLM Innovation, PLM Lifelike Search Injection. In the past, PLM companies had OEM agreements with enterprise search vendors (i.e. Endeca and Autonomy) to develop advanced search solutions. Last year Dassault Systems made a significant move in this space by acquiring enterprise search companyExalead. Two companies presented their enterprise search solution in this space – NorthRide and Alcove9. NorthRidge is primarily focused on development of search solution based on Open Source Solr/Lucene. Alcove9 is a spin off vDR Group. After development made on top of Autonomy and Exalead, Alcove9 is also moving towards Solr/Lucene platform. You may also check out Inforbix, developing product data application.

Aras and Enterprise Search

Aras is following OSS strategy to solve their momentarily interest in search. Built on top of Microsoft technological stack, Aras made an experiment with Microsoft based Search solutions. Most of them are coming today from SharePoint space.

I found the SharePoint search story a bit controversial. The actual cost of SharePoint solution can grow significantly depends on the size data storage and system configuration. Navigate your browser to the following interesting blog article to read more about The Real Cost SharePoint Search. You can also learn more about SharePoint search using ArnoldIT Overflight Search system. Navigate to the following link to browse through information about SharePoint search.

PLM, Enterprise Search and Open Source

Alcove9 and NorthRidge presented their solutions and vision of enterprise search related to Aras and PLM. Take a look on the following slides and make your conclusion.

Aras Enterprise Search Strategy

I found Aras’ strategy in the space of search interesting. I can expect customers are interested in search these days. PLM vendors experience challenging position in this place. We have seen OEM agreements and acquisitions made by other PLM vendors. Aras is taking an alternative way and playing with Lucene/Solr enterprise search platform to bundle it with Aras using community partnerships. Here is what Peter Schroer said about Aras Search Strategy.

What is my conclusion? The amount of information in manufacturing companies is growing. PLM vendors clearly see the need to solve this problem. The solutions seem to be beyond the level of databases. The information is located in multiple applications, systems, files, databases. Search is one of the possible options to help people to solve the information problem. Aras’ choice to follow “open source” path is complementary to Aras’ vision of Enterprise Open Source. It seems to me a good balance to Dassault/Exaled and OEM agreements made by other PLM vendors. I expect this space to become more active in the future. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Search Based App and PLM Innovation

February 21, 2011

Picture-91.pngThe following article in E-Commerce Times written by Paul Doscher of Exalead USA caught my attention this morning. Navigate your browser to the following link and read Search Based Applications: Smoke and Mirrors or Real Innovation. Exalead is an enterprise search outfit snatched by Dassault Systems in 2010. DS paid €135 million for Exalead technology and the concept of Search Based Applications (SBA). I had a chance to put some of my initial thoughts related to the DS-Exalead last year in my post – PLM Lifelike Search Injection. The E-Commerce article made me think again about how Search Based Applications (SBA) can change current PLM trajectories.

Search Based Apps: The Next Step in Enterprise Search

Mr. Doscher quote IDC’s Sue Feldman definition of what is Search Based Applications from IDC 2010 report: "They (SBA) deliver a purpose-designed user interface tailored to support a particular task or workflow. Examples of such search-based applications include e-discovery applications, search marketing/advertising dashboards, government intelligence analysts’ workstations, specialized life sciences research software, e-commerce merchandising workbenches, and premium publishing subscriber portals in financial services or healthcare." Later in the article, Mr. Doscher analyzes different aspects of SBAs and why they will case a shift in enterprise information processes. He defines SBA as a right tool and specifically focuses on semantic processing of data.

I found these analyzes reasonable. The traditional enterprise search results presented as a "laundry-list" became obsolete in my eyes already 3-5 years ago. Tailored SBA will provide a clear differentiation. Amount of data in enterprise organization coming from multiple systems is a reality of every manufacturing company.

If you are interested to learn more about Search Based Apps, I can recommend you to read the following book- Search Based Application by Greg Grefenstette published earlier this year.

PLM+Search=SBA?

In my view, all PLM vendors are facing a significant need to introduce the next innovative shift for their customers. The competition between PLM mind share vendors becomes stronger. Introducing of new platforms (Dassault V6, Siemens PLM TeamCenter, Creo), last announcements made by PLM companies in automotive sector and others – all evidence of strong competition in this domain. I can imagine information processing technologies can provide a significant interest of PLM vendors. All of them already tried to crack an enterprise search box by partnering or OEMing technologies from vendors like Endeca, Autonomy or Microsoft SharePoint. The interesting turn in adopting search technologies is in ability to provide new ways to analyze information.

Does SBA Solves PLM Problems?

I can identify two major problems in Product Lifecycle Management: absolute complexity of application and extremely high cost of change. What SBA and search technologies can bring to PLM in order to solve these problems. I can see some positive elements here- search can make information available. Search technologies can bring more efficient data processing techniques. From this side, search technologies are an absolute advantage, and I’m sure DS will leverage it in their future applications. However, I’m doubting SBA can solve the problem of PLM complexity. If I follow Sue Feldman, SBAs are tailored applications – "a purpose-designed user interface tailored to support a particular task or workflow". From this standpoint SBAs will open a next round of PLM customization and implementation. Each customer will potentially introduce a new set of requirements. From the demos presented on Exalead website, I learned that each SBA was actually developed to satisfy needs of a specific customer.

What is my conclusion? Search technologies are providing a clear advantage in future development of product lifecycle management. I can see a good chance for DS to improve their V6 platform by injecting Exalead stuff inside. At the same time, I don’t see SBA solving key problems of PLM such as complexity and implementation cost. Ownership of these technologies can provide some competitive advantages to Dassault. Other vendors can move to expanding partnership with other search vendors or using open source search technologies such as Lucene/Solr. Manufacturing companies of all sizes will be still interested in how to simplify products and make their next implementation for lower cost. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Freebie

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PLM Interest to Enterprise Search

September 9, 2010

I can see a growing interest of PLM providers to explore the story of enterprise search. This morning I’ve seen a mutual press release of Aras Corp. and NorthRidge Software. I liked this passage in the press-release:

PLM solutions encompass a wide range of complex data and files in a variety of formats, including CAD files, quality data, regulatory specifications, requirements, BOMs and more. With the NorthRidge Search Solution, Aras Innovator users can locate drawings, documents and other information by searching on keyword terms, phrases in the content or metadata values.

What is specially interesting in this information is that Aras is trying to follow their Open Source strategies and adopting Lucene and Solr a well known Open Source enterprise search solution and search libraries. If you want to learn more about Lucene you still can register to Lucene Revolution, which will happen in Boston in the beginning of October.

Just to remind you the previous events in PLM fast ride towards enterprise search technologies. Earlier this year, PTCconfirmed their OEM relationships with Endecca. Almost In parallel to that, Dassault Systems spent 135M Euros to acquire Exalead – a provider of web and enterprise search solution.

So, what means this enterprise search gold rush for PLM companies. I can see 3 main reasons why PLM solution providers can be interested in making their search and enterprise search arsenals stronger.

PLM Systems Complexity

This is probably the top interest. At the time that PLM concepts getting acceptance in the enterprise, complexity of the tools and implementation becomes one of the most critical showstoppers preventing PLM software vendors from going mainstream in organizations. Search as a paradigm seems to be an option to resolve this complexity.

Enterprise Software Competition

The competition among software vendors is growing. Mindshare PLM providers face a strong competition from other enterprise software vendors such as providers of ERP, Supply Chain, Manufacturing Execution and other software. Each of these enterprise application classes represents a silo of information inside of organization. Enterprise search can be a technology to find information in multiple silos.

Influence of Consumer Software

This is last, but very important. I can see a significant influence on enterprise software in general and on PLM specifically from everything that exists in the consumer software space and on the internet. Search is hugely popular because of the success of Google. It provides a significant impact on decisions of PLM vendors to follow these streams.

What is my conclusion? Enterprise Software and PLM are struggling with a “complexity disease”. On the other side, enterprise search software is struggling with the need to provide additional differentiation to their “boring” search stories. It seems to me as a perfect match between them. What is your opinion?

Best, Oleg

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Will PLM Move Beyond Search?

August 3, 2009

plm-beyond-searchWhat is the role of Search in PLM? This is question I want to discuss today. This year is busy for search community, Microsoft Bing and now Microsoft Yahoo agreement. I had chance to hear so many opposite opinions about search, so I decided to put this question in PLM Think Tank. On the one, very extreme side, I read Stephen Arnold is saying – search is a commodity or give away for free. On the other side of the street vendors like Autonomy is creating OEM alliances with Siemens, which include Siemens PLM business. I’m sure will not be able to put all opinions about search in this blog post, therefore, will be focusing on areas of search that relevant to what PLM is trying to achieve in organization.

I think for many years, Search was considered as simple function in CAD, PDM and lately Product Lifecycle Management interface. This is not true anymore! I’d expect search will start to play much more significant role in everything that happens in enterprise space. There are few reasons for that. First, search was very successful during that past few years in consumer’s applications. Second, enterprise landscape becomes extremely complex. Third , enterprise vendors will look for differentiation and search will be one of them.

These days, search vendors are trying to find special way for their solutions to enterprises. Some of them, I’d like to mention here:

Social Search. Since everything social becomes very popular, search is also here. There are many vendors focusing on searches in social networks. The key focus of these products is to insure real-time search capabilities in changed social networks. I don’t think real-time is extremely important for product lifecycle, but to be able to resolve complexity of social relationship in enterprise can be very interesting and beneficial.

Enterprise Information Search. In traditional approach, enterprise search vendors were focused on indexing of documents in enterprise content management system, enterprise vaults in beyond. Today’s trends show more interest from these vendors to go beyond document indexing and to show more functions to aggregate information and present it to the users.

Visual Search. You better will see it once… Yes, to be able to see results visually becomes important. I had chance to speak about 3D searches, and visual searches on my blog before. There are multiple aspects of visual effects and capabilities. From being able to see 3D models, to visualize graphically results and dependencies.

So, what is my conclusion so far? Success of search in a consumer market will continue to put demand from customer’s side and drive vendors to put more energy to search space. The solution is not there yet.

Best, Oleg.

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What is the future of search for PLM?

April 28, 2009

There is no doubt a search changed the way we work today on the Internet. Remember how looked for  information in the pre-Internet and pre-Google age? It wasn’t so simple as today. 

So, the change of the user’s behavior regarding ‘search’ has created a lot of opportunities on the Internet surface. I’ve tried to look at how PLM and search intersects and perhaps find new ways to improve PLM system behaviors today. I touched on this before in my posts about Enterprise Search and PLM. So, I’ll do a deeper discovery into this space.

 What is available today? :

 1.    Enterprise Search.

This term is used to describe the application of search technologies inside of organization. This term is opposite two other searches – web search and desktop search – it is probably the most relevant to what PLM does inside an organization. The ability to find the right information about product, documentation, changes etc. is extremely important. I think that this area will grow in the near  future.

 Microsoft Futuristic View on Enterprise Search

2.    3D Space search.

This is a very specific area in search applications that allows you to specify your search criteria based on certain geometric characteristics of a product. Even if such capabilities already exist inside of many PLM applications, this search is interesting since it can connect to an enterprise search. Actually, it’s important to integrate 3D Space search into enterprise search and other applications.

 Dassault Systems 3DLive User Experience (UX)

3.    Visual Search / 3D search

If 3D Space search mostly uses 3D as a criteria for search (WHERE), Visual search (or 3D search, as I call it) is mostly about being able to provide a search with information about WHAT to search for. This can be interesting for the decision making and design process areas – because it allows you to find all information visually. Sometimes, however, it’s misleading as it can be hidden by wrong meta-information and additional data.

 Innovative solution from 3DPartBrowser 

The above are my top three perspectives for Search in the PLM domain. I’m going to discover search topic in context of PLM during these days on Infonortics Search Meeting in Boston. During this meeting, I had some casual talk with Steven Arnold and got some interesting perspectives on his Beyond Search Blog. I’m looking forward to speak more about this topic in the future…


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FAST Impact on PLM

February 17, 2009

Microsoft finally disclosed their plan to integrate their product FAST ESP, acquired for $1.2B from a Norwegian company, one of the major players in the enterprise search market. Therefore, it’s no surprise that Microsoft is going to merge their offering into their popular Microsoft SharePoint platform. New capabilities will be introduced as part of the new Office version later this year. So, what’s going to be the result? SharePoint Server Search products will offer High-End search capability as part of their mainstream offering.

Going back to my PLM SharePoint Paradox post, I think that Microsoft is adding additional premium content and technologies that have the potential to be reused by PLM/PDM companies. What do PLM providers need to look for in this offering? I think that PLM providers would appreciate more infrastructure capabilities that would allow them to integrate SharePoint/Search with external content providers (as such PLM/PDM systems). Today’s Business Data Catalog (BDC) functionality is relatively simple and has a small capability for managing and exposing structured content. It’s clear that “content is the king” in enterprise and FAST enhancement of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server MOSS will allow more content to be absorbed, searched and accessed.

So, for now we will wait for the announced Microsoft SharePoint conference where MS will disclose its plans for its new SharePoint and Office version.

 

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What is the Role of Search in Enterprise Systems and PLM?

January 30, 2009

Going back to the early days of enterprise software, vendors developed all  they needed from very basic operational systems features. This is was the only way to implement functions of the system. Very core functionality of the system was data storage – the heart of each enterprise system. Storage was proprietary and optimized for the type and structure that data system were expected to manage. The real revolution began with the movement to database management systems (RDBMS). These provided a standard way of managing data and accessing it with SQL (Structured Query Language). For the last 20 years,  I see that this situation has remained unchanged. Enterprise software has created unpredictable huge data stacks managed by complex models and systems. During the last few years, active development of SOA related technologies have also focused on how to make enterprise software more manageable and lean.

With all the complexity of enterprise systems, I don’t see much involvement of search-related technologies within the enterprise. On the other hand, the search revolution has changed consumer internet, market, and actually, our lives (Google Map and beyond). I think that the future of search in enterprise is still unfolding. Enterprise systems are real gold-mines for search systems today. Search is really underperforming and focusing largely on the discovery of various documents  and document content.

At the same time, I’ve seen some movements within enterprise search, and search in general. Multiple “verticalization” of search is focusing on how to provide vertical domain specific searches. Examples are searches for healthcare, consumer market niches and others. “Horizontal” activities are investing into semantic searches as well as information discovery areas. A separate focus is the delivery of search appliances (of course, with a heavy investment of Google in GSA).

I think that searches need to leverage technology and capabilities developed for Web and unfold enterprise data for users. PLM might be a good starting point. Today’s PLM implementation survives from the need to consolidate different domains of activity around product development – starting from product requirements and customers, and ending  in product recycling and regulation. Search can become a good platform to make this happen. The complexity of enterprise systems and their openness is a real challenge for search technology, and, as typical in this case, leaves a  lot of space for innovation.

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Which technology can convert multiple PDMs into a single PLM?

January 9, 2009

In today’s product landscape, almost all CAD manufacturers have developed their own data management tool. I think that basic PDM capabilities such as data revisions, changes, and support for multiple locations have become very connected to a particular CAD system. The main reasons for this are customer needs and the growing complexity of CAD tools. This means that very soon we will find ourselves in the world of CAD+PDM bundles.

 Will CAD/PDM bundles affect PLM in any way? My assumption is that the standardization of CAD/PDM bundles can provide the next steps in the development of Product Lifecycle Management in an organization. When this happens, basic data management problems will already be resolved and manufacturers will start looking how to organize a single product development process  and single product lifecycle process for an organization.

 In my opinion, the following four technologies are good candidates to resolve these challenges: (1) Business Process Management; (2) Enterprise Search and 3D Search; (3) 3D Technologies (4) Mashups.

 Let’s talk about them in more details:.

 1. Business Process Management focuses on definition, execution and monitoring of processes. The definition portion is important –  if a meta model of Business Process Management tools will be able to support product and related organizational models, it will be capable of serving as  a technological layer to keep product lifecycle in an organization. The key problem of today’s BPM(s) tools is that they are rather agnostic with regards to content. As soon as meta-data modeling capabilities of BPM technologies will improve, t we will probably see them connect well with CAD/PDM bundles.

 2. Enterprise Search and 3D Search will be able to coordinate product data and lifecycle data. Enterprise Search technologies were boosted during the last year or two. The main reasons for this boost  were the increased amount of data and a very proactive position of Google and its GSA offering. Enterprise Search technologies have become more vertical – together with a cheap GSA offering and the growing interest of vendors like Microsoft providing ES as part of MOSS, are  very promising. Another part of search technologies is the 3D search. This can add a special flavor for CAD-related models and engineering activities. Just imagine maintenance people being able to find part numbers by scanning the picture of the defected part…

 3. 3D technologies is another valid technological option. Since most of product development can be presented in 3D, this 3D experience can absorb and provide a single organizational view for the product lifecycle.  One example of such a technology is Dassault Systèmes’ 3DLive product which continues  following 3D Lifelike experience in V6. Future connections to gaming and other 3D technologies can create a solid platform for unifying all CAD/PDM product bundles used by designers. 

4. Mashups technologies combines data came from different sources. Initially, heavily promoted by GIS and map based products, this technology has improved and become useful for combining various pieces of data. This also provides required functionality when a product is developed by multiple CADs systems and managed by multiple PDM systems. 

Bottom line – I believe that the technologies I mentioned (and may be some other technologies) can take Product Lifecycle Management from multiple PDM systems to a single PLM environment. Who will actually do it? This is an open call… 

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PLM and Enterprise Search: can we leverage it in downstream applications?

December 15, 2008

The benefits of search solution are obvious. It helps you to find what do you need. Over the past decade Enterprise Search emerged to the level succeeded to provide a solution for indexing documents and additional information, mostly in databases, vaults, content management systems and ERP. PLM system provides a solution to search product information, since this information is well organized and indexed inside of PLM databases and vaults. Unfortunately, this product related information and documents is not available outside of PLM world. However, this information highly demanded by many people in the organization.

Enterprise Search solutions represented by two main groups of providers – traditional providers of enterprise search (Autonomy, Exaled and others) and general search vendors (lead by Google’s GSA) trying to get into the enterprise market. Microsoft, after FAST acquisition, provide an enterprise search solution as well as SharePoint and Express Search Server solution.

Gartner positioned top companies provided enterprise search solutions in their 2008 magic quadrant (bellow).

I think Enterprise Search can be connected to PLM system. By doing that Enterprise Search will  index product data, documents and will make it available outside of engineering department for all people in the organization.

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