PLM Open Source: Strategic or Off Road?

March 17, 2011

I’m watching closely everything that happens around with Open Source. The world of Open Source is changing all the time. Remember, in the beginning it was about Linux. Then it comes to other places – content management, CRM, enterprise search, mobile platforms and many other places. What happens with manufacturing and engineering systems? Is there a place where Open Source can provide some advantages? I read an article Open Source Software Hits a Strategic Tipping Point by Laurie Wurster. The author discusses what traction Open Source getting in the industry. Here you can see some information about the level of Open Source acceptance on the picture below provided by Gartner.

Picture-25.png

These numbers made me think about what possible path Open Source can take in engineering and manufacturing software segments.

Open Source Debates

I can observe multiple debates in the software community about what is Open Source and what software can be qualified as Open Source. In general I can see an open source as a model that promotes availability of the software source code to the system end users and following modification. However, the model, is not clean and transforming all the time. Some disputed models in this space are community-based development as well as mixed licensing where some of the system code is proprietary and another piece is open under one of avaialble open source licenses. Alternative, stricter definition refers to the Gartner’s definition of Open Source as a software released under Open Source Initiative licenses.

Open Source and Engineering Software Segments

In my view, Open Source might have a different potential in engineering and manufacturing software segments. It depends on the level of specialty, community size and existing software product and vendors strategy in this segment. In general, I can see an open source trend is to go bottom up from more generic type of software to more specific one. The size of the potential community is also very important. For example, CAD/CAE is a segment, which can be characterized by very specific skills, large number of mature products and software vendors. Despite few examples (Archimedes, BRL-CAD,avoCADo), I think, chance for CAD Open Source is relatively low in coming few years. On the other side, data management has a wider implementation scope. There are several mature open source products in this space such asMySQL, Cassandra and others, so a potential data management solution such as PDM can be very possible created by community of data-oriented developers. The last segment I wanted to touch is so called "software for collaboration". In my view, this is one of the most confusing in the space of engineering and manufacturing. At the same time, there are many open source tools in this category that can provide a value and can be easy enhanced with additional features.

What is my conclusion? I think Open Source gains acceptance and making progress in diverse fields. Depending on the application field it can become strategic or get off road. However, your organization needs to have a set of skills to make an open source happen. It is all about implementation, changes, coding, testing. It cost money and resources. Multiple tools can be combined into compelling solution. Do you think Open Source is for your organization? What flavor of Open Source do you prefer and see more applicable? I’m going to discuss it next month during my Beyond PLM panel on Aras Community Event (ACE) next month.

Best, Oleg
Freebie.

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PLM and Open Standards: Money Talks?

March 5, 2011

I’m keeping my eyes open for everything that happens in the space associated with open source and open standards. Open standards are not well developed in engineering and manufacturing space. In my view, CAD / PLM mind share vendors are not on the leading edge of open standard development. I can see multiple reasons to that – traditional orientation on proprietary data, strong competition, IP protection and what is mostly important – business strategy oriented on locking customers on the particular software with strong emphasizing of recurrent revenues coming from upgrades, renewals and next versions.

The following article caught my attention – “UK Government Defines Open Standards as Royalty Free”. It made me think that open source and open standard can have more momentum ahead.

New procurement guidance from the UK government has defined open standards as having "intellectual property made irrevocably available on a royalty free basis". The document, which has been published by the Cabinet Office, applies to all government departments and says that, when purchasing software, technology infrastructure, security or other goods and services, departments should "wherever possible deploy open standards".

My perspective on Open and Free was always from the standpoint of marketing practice. Open Source, Freemium Business models – these are examples I mentioned in my blog before as something that may have a significant potential in the future. Companies may develop their own understanding of "open" and "open standards". It is interesting to see the future trajectory of JT as an open standard. Aras PLM is an example of vendor that developing their position in the market as "enterprise open source". Will "enterprise open source" develops a different notion of "open source"? How "enterprise open source" will correspond to the notion of "intellectual property made irrevocably available on a royalty free basis" – a good question to ask. I’m going to ask these questions on my Beyond PLM panel during Aras Community Event in April 2011 in Dearborn, MI.

What is my conclusion? In my view Open has a future. "Proprietary" and "customer locking" will be diminished within the time. However, to move between these two polar points takes time and significant amounts of turbulence. Existing vendors, legacy software, business models – cost of change is significant. But cost of saving will be huge on the side of manufacturing and consumers. In my view, companies will need to take the leapfrog in order to compete in a different way.

Best, Oleg
Freebie. (irrevocably available)

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PLM Innovation and Packaging Trajectories

December 18, 2010

Innovation is a popular word these days. It sounds modern and trending. Everybody wants to jump to this bandwagon. I found myself reading and listening a lot about innovation during last time. The best book, I can recommend you is Peter Druker’s bestseller – Innovation and Entrepreneurship. It was re-printed many times. You can buy one on Amazon for a price less than one buck. However, the book is exceptional.

I spent Thursday listening and talking about innovation in engineering software during COFES Israel Forum in Hilton Tel-Aviv. You can get an idea about who attended by navigating your browser to COFES Israelwebsite. Brian Shepherd of PTC brought the idea of packaging in PLM. It made me think about some interesting trajectories related to the innovation in general and more specifically in PLM.

Packaging and Roles

The idea is to split application into pieces and providing different applications to people in a company. It sounds to me as a blend of the old “role-based” portfolio and trending App Store ideas. The fundamentals of this model are very healthy, in my view. However, the execution of this “re-packaging” is mostly important. The ability of apps for inter-play and exchange information is one of the most critical aspects. The second will be usage of heterogeneous Apps coming from different vendors. As you can see the backside of flexible packaging is the same data problem. PTC has something called Common Data Model. You can listen Mike Campbell of PTC is speaking here about Creo Common Data Model. It will be interesting to see how it will be different from Dassault V6 platform.

Enterprise Open Source

Another idea how to charge people for PLM in a less painful manner. Aras Corp. is leading this PLM innovation. You can get PLM software for free – no associated license cost. However, you will be able to get extra services by paying maintenance, subscription and services. This model, re-package a very complicated PLM sales process as well lower entry barrier. An additional aspect of this innovation is to prove software maturity by enabling people to run free download and evaluation. The last is only half true, in my view. Yes, you can download for free. However, your organization time is not free. In most of the situations, you can have a free PLM software for evaluation from other PLM vendors.

Services

This business model started many years ago as ASP model. Later, it was renamed as “on-demand” and SaaS. Now this model is associated with so called “cloud” platforms. The leader of SaaS offering, San-Francisco based Salesforce.comis selling the software by charging service money per month/year contracts. PLM early innovators in this space is bom.com (later re-branded as Arena Solutions). To sell services is an interesting approach and provide some financial benefits. However, PLM by nature removes one of the most strong advantages of SaaS model – flexibility to stop service at any time. At the time your data will be locked into PLM database, you need to pay to both providers until you will transfer your assets in an alternative system.

What is my conclusion? Reading the same book by Peter Druker, you can find, innovation may happen in different places. Product, Technology, Services, Business Processes, Logistic and Business Model. Edward Lewis from Hollywood fairy tale Pretty Woman is buying up businesses to break them up and sell them off in piece with a profit. It is hard to sell large PLM Platform these days. PLM vendors are trying to find an alternative model, which will be more successful in 2010s. Services, Open Source, Re-packging – all these models have one single root – to find an appropriate way to match customer needs and product offering. The innovation is in a business model. However, the simplicity of products is probably the key to success.

Best, Oleg

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Lucene Revolution and PLM Open Source Thoughts

October 11, 2010

Last week, I attended a conference Lucene Revolution. The show was organized by a company Lucid Imagination, an outfit focusing how to repeat a success Red Hat made with Linux. For those who don’t know Lucid, their business is around a significant piece of open source Lucene and Solr. These products are all about search and enterprise search. Lucene is a text search engine library, and Solr is an open source enterprise search platform. To learn more about what Lucid is doing, navigate to their website.

Open Source Mojo

This is not a first time, I’m writing and thinking about Open Source. I think, Open Source represents some shifts in software development culture, which is absolutely important to understand. I’ve seen an excellent opportunity to learn about a community behind Lucene and Lucid business. The first I’ve seen is a community of coders. People actually were talking and coding and discussing what they code at the same time. So, here is a very important attribute of open source solution – community, comes into play. Second is customers and solution implementations are working together. Third, a business entity such as Lucid is thinking how to organize and expand this solution to make it more successful. You can see how all these three elements – community, customers and business entity interplay. It was an interesting experience to see working together.

PLM Open Source

Lucene Revolution made me think again about a current situation with Open Source PLM space. I’m aware about multiple Open Source initiatives happens now and, of course, Aras Innovator. I can see a certain interest in this field. However, in my view, all Open Source PLM projects are far from a maturity of libraries or products that can provide a valuable solution for customer. On the opposite side, Aras Innovator, represents a special type of solution that stands between community open source and freeware software. I can see some movement in Open Source PLM. There are few inhibitors – community, scale, and openness. The size of community is absolutely critical. The solution needs to be a viral and open to be adopted by a wide community of customers and supporter. Openness seems to be an obvious, but not simple.

What is my conclusion? There are two main questions I tried to answer: 1/what is the potential of FOSS models in enterprise and business software? 2/ what type of unique transformation needs to be done in Open Source to make it viable as a PLM solution for enterprise companies? My short answer on the first question is "licensing cost". This is what, in my view, drives PLM Open Source now. I think, ROI of PLM solutions is a slow and "free license" is much more important word in PLM Open Source game now. The answer on a second question is more complicated. PLM industry needs to find something that answers the following criteria – mature solution, high level adoption rate and a community of coders that will be ready stand behind this solution. I’m not sure we have one answer this… yet. Just my thoughts.

Best, Oleg

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PLM: Open Source vs. Free?

September 27, 2010

I posted PLM and Open Source Licenses few days ago. The main trigger of this post was Google’s announcement about acceptance of all OSI licenses. However, as it sometimes happens blog post is just a trigger for another interesting discussion. Marc Lind of Aras and Yoann Maingon of Prodeos had very interesting debates about a potential role of Open Source in PLM and the role of OSS in Software industry. You can catch up on this discussion navigating your browser on the following link. There are few very interesting statements made by Marc and Yoann. You need to read it in full. However, below, my two favorite passages from this discussion:

MarcL: It has always been difficult to build a business in software and probably always will be. However, what open source does is make trying easier and less required up-front investment for the developer. Now, developers and entrepreneurs can build software products, Web sites, etc at any level of the stack without paying for the infrastructure. They can sell those applications without the customer having to buy a bunch of other products as well. OSS opens the door to leveraging much more than just code/free software, ideas are much more easily exchanged, inspiration comes faster, combining products to make full solutions is easier than ever before and more cost effective.

YoannM: I think the Sun and Dassault examples of delivering free software against commercial solution is a very important fact. Out of the software industry, that would be illegal. It’s a basic rule of capitalism used to regulate the market. If a competitor can prove that you sell a product with loss on purpose he can sue you. And i suppose it is more the case in the US than in Europe (Even if Europe made enormous progress on market regulation). The Aras case is not the same as you can prove that a Real profitable Business Model exist on this particular software.I think there should be real investigator making sure that no Open Source project is done by one company without a profitable Business Plan.

This conversation made me think more about PLM and Open Source. I’d like to come with the following conclusion. It is not only about OSS (Open Source Software). There is a third party in the room – Free. So, I decided to put some thoughts towards structuring of this conversation.

Open Source Software (OSS)

For all newcomers in the Open Source story, my recommendation is to have a look on the history of Linux software. The best starting point is Linux Wikipedia article. The history of Linux creation will give you some idea about fundamental thoughts behind Open Source, community-based development and interest of developers to have a strong and open operation system that can be used for multiple applications. One of the important points is how OSS code evolves between different versions of Linux and predecessors. UNIX as a strong predecessor of Linux played a significant role in forming of Linux community and development practices. My interim conclusion here is very simple – a potentially wide non-competing community and strong foundation are two important factors that can help to forum a successful OSS project.

Free Model

The idea of Free is not new. Business invented a free model many years ago and used it successfully in various types of businesses. If you want to be up-to-speed with ideas of free, I’d recommend you to read a book FREE: The Future of Radical Price by Chris Anderson. I’m considering this book as a modern bible of Free model. The fundamental idea of free is to re-shape business model and create an option to provide part of your product or services for free. Without making it too complex, you can decide how to make you business more attractive by providing FREE products. Free is good and we love it! Nevertheless, I can see advantages and disadvantages of a free model in B2B. What it helps is to decrease a cost of customer acquisition. You can get customers for free. However, the correct – you’ll get users for free. Then, you need to convert your free users into customers who will pay you money. This is so called "convergence rate".

What it means for PLM?

I can see few aspects of PLM that make it attractive in the context of OSS and Free models. PLM faced significant challenges when started to proliferate in implementation of the systems downstream from big OEMs like Boeing and Toyota to smaller companies. It caused by what I call "One Size Doesn’t Fit All" problems. Massive need for customization and long deployment activities created a perception of long ROI for PLM and complex implementation practices. In parallel to that, PLM deployments faced difficulties in spreading out to more people in an organization. I can see two main reasons – too complex UI and high cost of licenses. All these factors created a good basement for innovating in order to improve a situation. Aras’ business model innovation that removes up-front fees, as it was mentioned by Marc Lind, is one of the important drivers helps Aras Innovator to acquire new customers and get all people using PLM system in an organization. In addition, community effort allows to customers, partners and other interested parties to be involved into development solutions to answer on "one size doesn’t fit all" problems.

What is my conclusion? Both "free" and "open source" can create an interesting innovation trend and change today’s status quo. However, I don’t think it is a silver bullet. Businesses have a lot of concerns about "free model", since everybody understands that, in the end, TCO is important. On the other side, free can make PLM systems widely adopted and not limit to organizations that can pay for PLM licenses. Open Source is a separate story. To have a broad community is one of the main questions to be answered to understand the potential viability of PLM Open Source. Just my thoughts… I’m looking to your comments, opinions and discussion.

Best, Oleg

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PLM and Open Source Licenses

September 23, 2010

I want to talk about licenses. The topic I’d normally prefer to avoid. Deelip Menezes made a good post about Sales and Licensing of software. However, I want to talk about specific part of licenses – Open Source and Free Licenses. I don’t understand the subtle differences about various types of Open Source Licenses. The discussion about licenses usually lead to long conversations with legal eagles and I feel myself very unsafe in these conversations. The following article cough my attention – Google Code accepts all OSI licenses. I recommend you to have a read an interview with Chris DiBona.

Google has announced its Google Code developer site will now host open-source projects using any license approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Previously, as part of its longstanding protest against "license proliferation," the web giant only allowed projects using a small subset of OSI licenses. Google still doesn’t like license proliferation, but it’s embracing more licenses, nonetheless. "We think we’ve made our point [about license proliferation] and that this new way of doing things is a better fit to our goal of supporting open source software developers," reads a blog post from Google open-source guru Chris DiBona.

Few years ago, Open Source was absolutely not an option for enterprise organizations. However, life changed these days. Open source is discussed and many people are trying to innovate in this space in order to find the right answers from various standpoints – technical, product, portfolio and legal. So, I decide to spend some time talking with you about what could be an appropriate open source licensing option for PLM world.

Free and Open Source Licenses

This is a good read about the history and background about the comparison between various available Free Software Licenses and Open Source Licenses. There are two organizations related to this matter – Open Source Initiative (OSI) and Free Software Foundation (FSF). There is some overlap between them. You may take a look on the comparison of Free Software licenses by navigating on the link.

Open Source Initiatives

Navigate your browser on the following link. You can see available open source licenses approved by Open Source Initiative. What was interesting to me is to see categories of licenses such as Popular, Redundant and non-Categorized. The last contains quite many licenses. Also, there is also a category for non-reusable license. Website contains information about OSI license review process. I recommend you to spend some time on this site.

Free and Open in PLM World

Aras is the only one company I know in PLM world promoting the ideas of Open Source and Free licenses. Aras introducing their way for Open Source – Aras Enterprise Open Source. This is the explanation I found on Aras’ website.

…Our [Aras] approach was to combine multiple software formats, OSI-compliant open source, community sourceand commercial platforms, in a mixed source structure to provide the assurance necessary for business-critical solutions while delivering the flexibility for collaborative innovation. We [Aras] call it enterprise open source.

It is interesting that I didn’t find any reference to Aras on the Enterprise Open Source directory website. According to the information provided here, the website contains about 140’000 references on enterprise open source projects.

What is my conclusion? The Open Sournce licensing story is damn complicated. However, with a growing interest and influence, understanding of available open source and fee software licenses will be crucial. I’d be interested to hear about your experience and to know your opinion about that.

Best, Oleg

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Oracle, Google and Aras’ 226% Growth

August 30, 2010

I read the following article “Oracle v Google: Why?“. I found it as a very deep analysis of the latest Oracle’s bold move against Google. It is hard to predict how this clash will be resolved and who will be a winner and loser or may be both. Read this article and make your opinion. My hunch is that there is a portion of the game related to Open Source. FOSS became stronger over the last years and drove multiple interest from vendors and user communities. Oracle (but not only) kingdom can be definitely impacted by a variety of Open Source initiatives growing in enterprise organizations these days.

In this context, I found a very interesting news came out of Open Source provider Aras:  Aras Momentum Accelerates Driving 226% Sales Growth in First Half 2010. Here is the quote from Aras’s PR: Aras’s strong performance is driven by the continued growth in worldwide adoption of the Aras Innovator suite, and demonstrates mainstream acceptance of the Aras enterprise open source model and advanced PLM technology by Fortune 500 / Forbes Global 2000 companies.

What is my take? Open Source is definitely a long term target in Oracle lawsuit against Google. This is a beginning of the fight against the Open Source. Google is an easy, but intermediate target. My conclusion – important.

Best, Oleg
Freebie. Aras didn’t pay me for this post.

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Wikipedia: PLM Open Source Reference?

August 5, 2010

It becomes very common to use Wikipedia for most research projects. It becomes an ultimate source of information open for everybody. Do you think Wikipedia can become an open source reference for the information about software for engineering and manufacturing? Kind of Open Source PLM reference place?

What is a good source of knowledge about CAD, PDM, PLM and other systems? What can be used as a consolidated information reference? Think how much time we are spending in discussions about terminology, names, useful practices? What if Wikipedia will become this sort of knowledge? To understand current “state of the art”, I spent some time browsing PLM-related resources on Wikipedia. Here is my list of the references and my conclusion.

Terminology

I found quite complicated to work on well known TLAs. The search for PLM, brings the following definition:
Product lifecycle management, the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product. In addition, multiple searches for relevant terms are available. One of them stated as a PLM (marketing) is very far from product lifecycle management definitions and hardly can be a reference.
Some of other useful links - CAD, PDM, PLM, CAE, CAM. .

Companies

This part of Wikipedia is in a good shape, in my view. Most of the companies are represented. Sometimes, you can find interesting link redirection caused by company acquisitions, renaming and re-branding.

Autodesk
Aras (wasn’t intuitive to find- who may think searching for Corp.?)
Arena Solutions
Bentley Systems (was confused by multiple links to Bentley cars)
Dassault Systems (contains lots of links on deleted pages as a result of re-branding)
SolidWorks
PTC

Siemens PLM (recently renamed as Siemens Industry Software, according to upFront.eZine)

This is, of course, not a full list. I just started to come with some initial list and examples.

Standards

I found as a very complicated task to find PLM related standards. I found STEP (ISO 10303) pages in a relatively good shape. Also, list of “Engineering Standards” returned by Wikipedia search contains a list of interesting resources.

Other Resources

I found PLMPedia as a good resource of information about PLM. The PLMPedia initiative belongs to the Russian forum isicad.

What is my conclusion? I think the industry need to have a good reference source. Wikipedia is an excellent open source reference that can be adopted and used by lots of engineers and developers. These days I can see quality of industry is in supporting “open source reference”. Wikipedia is a good candidate for such information placement.

If you are aware about any additional information resources related to CAD, PLM and other engineering and manufacturing software, please send me links or comment on blog.

Best, Oleg

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PLM, Technological Choice and Open Source Revolution

July 23, 2010

The acceptance of Open Source technologies is growing. One of the latest examples of products in open source movement that caught my attention was Lucid Imagination. Lucid is built on top ofLucene and Solr – open source search libraries and enterprise search solutions. I was thinking about trajectories of Open Source solutions and found that the majority of them started their paths from a particular technological choice. It is known as LAMP Stack. So, the topic I wanted to discuss today is what is the impact of a specific technological choice on the solution.

Open Source Technological Choice
The choice of open source technologies today is become more and more dominant for the newcomers. New software companies are selecting open source software as their default technological stacks. Web, wide adoption of OSS and low cost of the solution brings a massive amount of new business in this space. I can see a significant shift in this space compared to the last decade.

OSS driven business
It is very interesting to see a route of building OSS based business. I can figure out several aspects of this build up – technology, community, product and business. The sequence of these aspects is exactly how I mentioned them. The technological choice is based on OSS projects is the core foundation of the solution. It gives the root for creation of community of people involvement into this development. The community is one of the most fundamental elements of any OSS project. This is a live indicator of the project. As much as development becomes more mature it can be turned into a deployed product. Only at this stage, this product can be converted into business either by redistributing of the certified code or by providing consultancy and service development.

OSS and Enterprise Software
For the long period of time, enterprise software, in general, and built for the enterprise PLM, was very protective about Open Source. OSS violated some very basic rules of enterprise software business related to licensing, redistribution and liabilities of the software development companies in the context of software code originality. I can see a significant change in this trend now. Multiple OSS solutions started to be much more popular in the enterprise. Just to mention – Sugar CRM, Drupal, Alfresco as examples of acceptance of open source solution in the enterprise. The latest example is Lucene/Solr and company Lucid Imagination that are taking Lucene and Solr Enterprise Search solutions for distribution in a similar way RedHat did it for Linux.

OSS and PLM
I can see a certain opportunity in Open Source PLM innovation. The first very visible company in this space was Aras. Started on the MS code-based, they are mostly focusing on a business model. The absence of OSS technological foundation and community development can provide a significant negative impact on the Aras Open Source PLM future. However, innovation role of Aras, can be considered as a very positive in the context of building industry perception related to Open Source PLM.

What is my conclusion today? I think, open source revolution will be coming to PLM too. However, to make it happen, all aspects of Open Source influence need to come into balance. I can see a significant level of dependencies between them. It starts from the technologies that drive openness and innovation. Then it creates a community of developers and users of this software. They eventually are creating the next step- open product innovation. And, finally it comes to the business model of open source in the way of reliance on free distribution, community contribution and business profit for companies that supports the development of these models. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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PLM Wood and Open Source Termites?

July 5, 2010

Last week I wrote about PLM and Open Source Big Games. One of my conclusions was that PLM Open Source can become an interesting option in PLM and Enterprise space when it comes as community based development and include the ability to leverage existing Open Source projects  Today, I wanted to come with the example that matches this pattern. SAP is a well known big enterprise outfit that has some stakes in Product Lifecycle Management too. I had chance to read the following article by CMS Wire about CoreMedia Open Source Content Management portal platform for SAP users - CoreMedia Web CMS Readies to Woo SAP Portal Users.

I found this read interesting. SAP Portal developments can be considered as a “dead wood”. SAP has their own portal strategy. In addition, SAP and Microsoft’s partnership brings lots of Microsoft SharePoint stuff in this space as well. However, CoreMedia open content management platform, can be proposed as an open source option to drive some user attention in this space.

The following two quote is very interesting:

Interestingly, many of SAP’s known features — such as collaboration and KM (Knowledge Management) — CoreMedia chose not to support — focusing mainly on the infrastructure/delivery capabilities — citing the fact that they wanted to avoid any “dependencies” on those features based on what they heard about SAP not developing those capabilities in the future.

CoreMedia is already doing some personalization and social software features in the Web CMS, but later on the roadmap we should see more of that being done for SAP customers, so that they can use inherent to SAP transactional data (from CRM, ERP, etc.) to enhance their existing online engagement offerings. Transactional data managed by SAP is becoming more valuable on the web, as organizations are looking to drive the web more dynamically and to have a more personalized website. Hence, more attention to CoreMedia’s Content Application Engine (CAE) in the second phase.

PLM Open Source Platform?

CoreMedia example made me think about what can be a potential open source platform for PLM? All available PLM platforms in the market today are proprietary platforms developed in the last two decades. The cost of any of these platforms is high. To develop a new PLM Platform can be mission impossible. However, you can think about potential injection of open source components into these platforms. This can be a gradual process that will make a transformation into PLM platforms towards additional openness and significant cost saving for customers. The focus of such injection can be around infrastructure and not around end user modules. It will allow to lay a foundation for the future community development and contribution.

What is my conclusion? PLM. Wooden Platforms. Open Source Infrastructure Termites. It can be an interesting option to disrupt existing PLM software. Remember Jim Brown’s Who Will Disrupt Entrenched PLM Vendors? The Open Source option was there too… The potential benefits are clear to me – cost, openness, community benefits. There is a danger too. The complexity of PLM projects is very high. A significant level of integration requires to make PLM projects successful. Will Open Source Platform be capable of handle it?  What do you think about that? Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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