Future PLM platforms and SAP / Oracle technological wars

January 26, 2012

All existing PDM / PLM technologies were created 15-20 years ago. I hope I’ve got your attention :) . So, let me speak a bit more about technologies today. Past 10 years of web development for the consumer market created a significant technological foundation that cannot be ignored. Most of the enterprise software in production these days is running on the technologies created at least a decade ago.

Let’s talk first about major 4 PLM providers – Dassault Systems, PTC, Siemens PLM and the platform they use for their flagship PLM products. Enovia from Dassault technological foundation came from MatrixOne acquisition formerMatrixOne/Adra development 15-20 years ago. PTC is using Windchill coming back in 1998 from CV acquisition. Siemens PLM platform – TeamCenter is also coming from acquired and transformed product lines of Metaphase and IMAN.

Thinking about PLM platforms, you cannot avoid and not to speak about long time pure-PLM rivals coming from ERP software – SAP and Oracle. Oracle is leading the way towards full-fledged usage of Oracle Fusion platform. Despite multiple delays and re-orgs, it seems to me the way Oracle is thinking about business application platform for enterprise. Oracle is also leveraging their in-house innovation of database technologies.

I was reading an interesting article by ArnoldIT – SAP: Lemons from Lemonade for Search vendors. The article referencing technology coming from SAP called HANA. According to SAP blog:

HANA is the foundation and the core of all that we do now and going forward for existing products, new products and entirely new frontiers. We are transforming enterprise software with HANA, and we are transforming our entire product portfolio,” Sikka said in a statement earlier this week announcing that SAP HANA is now generally available worldwide. “But HANA is more than a product,” Sikka continued. “It is a new paradigm, an entirely new way to build applications. It is the basis for our own intellectual renewal internally at SAP—where we rethink how we design, build, deploy, service and sell products—and the basis for our customers’ and partners’ intellectual renewal—where we help customers rethink existing business problems and help them solve entirely new challenges using design-thinking.” (Source: The Top 10 Reasons SAP HANA Is Disrupting Larry Ellison’s Grand Plans]

Take a look on a very interesting video about HANA evolution.

Few screenshots I captured from this video (below) clearly shows the technological problem PLM vendors are trying to solve already for many years- creating a scalable business application platform capable of handling the complexity of data needed for product development and manufacturers.

Typical problem of enterprise applications.

The complexity of platforms and solutions today.

HANA way to solve the problem.

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

Best, Oleg

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

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Posted by olegshilovitsky

Will Database in the Cloud supercharge PLM for Small Companies?

October 23, 2011

I want to talk about an interesting segment of cloud technologies – cloud SQL Database. For the last months, I’ve seen multiple announcements of vendors in this space. Overall, it seems as an interesting trend. In a nutshell, cloud SQL database is a service that allows you to have your SQL database running "somewhere" on the cloud. Thinking about PDM/PLM solutions for small companies, database is a critical component. Database installation made overall product installation complicated. Future configuration, tuning and administration of this database create another level of complications.

So, what is available today on the market to provide cloud SQL database services? Here is the list of most popular solutions: Amazon EC2 RDS, SQL Azure, Google Cloud SQL, Salesforce’s Database.com, Oracle Database Cloud.

SQL Azure

Microsoft is building their own Azure platform. Databse service is part of the Microsoft’s cloud platform. If you 100% relies on top of Microsoft development stack, you may find SQL Azure attractive. Read more here and watch the video:

Google Cloud SQL

Google just announced the availability of Cloud SQL service few weeks ago. Read the following article Google Adds Cloud Based SQL Database to App Engine and Google’s blog Goolge Cloud SQL: Your database in the cloud to learn more. Here is the passage from Google’s blog about what Google provides to developers:

  • No maintenance or administration – we manage the database for you.
  • High reliability and availability – your data is replicated synchronously to multiple data centers. Machine, rack and data center failures are handled automatically to minimize end-user impact.
  • Familiar MySQL database environment with JDBC support (for Java-based App Engine applications) and DB-API support (for Python-based App Engine applications).
  • Comprehensive user interface for administering databases.
  • Simple and powerful integration with Google App Engine

Salesforce Database.com

Salesforce is aggressively pushing more services to power more salesforce services on the cloud. The fact salesforce is using database.com domain for these purposes is very symbolic. Take a look on this following video to learn more about database service.

Oracle Database Cloud

Very recently, Oracle announced Oracle Public Cloud. As part of this cloud offering Oracle is providing an access to their popular database via so called Oracle Database Cloud Services. Watch the following video for more:

Amazon EC2 RDS

Last, but not least. Amazon is one of the most popular providers of cloud infrastructure today. As part of Amazon Elastic Cloud (EC2) you can have an access to Amazon Relational Database services (RDS). You can learn more here. Amazon is not developing their own database, but provide you an access to one of the popular databases on the market. This is an interesting differentiation from all previous solutions that I described.

What is my conclusion? As you can see database service from the cloud is not a unique service these days. Large vendors like Oracle are jumping into this space to compete with their old competitors (like Microsoft) and newcomers (Google and Salesforce.com). It is an interesting decision point for PDM/PLM companies developed their infrastructure for years on top of existing infrastructure. The opportunity to remove complexity is huge, in my view. However, to change existing infrastructure and make this change (both technological and business) will be not a simple task. The fastest will be winners in this game. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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3 Key Cloud Principles: Will CAD/PLM follow?

October 7, 2011

I’ve been watching what happens around Oracle Open World 11 earlier this week. Among multiple topics, the announcement about Oracle Cloud and controversy around cancellation of Mark Benioff’s keynote caught my attention. Oracle unveils “Oracle Public Cloud” and claims “no locking” there. You can read Oracle announcement here. Navigate your browser to the following Informationweek article to read more. Oracle announcement and Salesforce Mark Benioff canceled keynote raised lots of discussions about the cloud, options, single tenant vs. multi-tenant cloud solution and much more. Take a look on the following passage from Information Week about that:

Ellison underscored the difference between Oracle’s public cloud approach and Salesforce’s by saying a Java Enterprise Edition application would run in either Oracle’s or Amazon Web Services’ EC2 infrastructure, but it wouldn’t run in Salesforce’s. The Oracle cloud will be “open and standards based,” he said. “If you want Apex, that would be Salesforce,” he said, referring to Saleforce’s proprietary language. “The Salesforce.com cloud is kind of sticky. You can check in, but you can’t check out. It’s the roach motel of clouds,” he said. The contrary-to-Salesforce focus came just four hours after Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff held his own event next to Oracle OpenWorld where he attacked Oracle’s “single tenant” approach to selling software and its retro commitment to “Exadata mainframe machines.”

Here is Oracle’s definition of public cloud.

At the same time, Mark Benioff of Salesforce counter argument with Oracle about what is “True Cloud” solution. I’m not sure claiming ” true” or “false” is something that actually can apply. You can watch an interesting video Q&A where Benioff explains what means “true cloud” as well as shape out three key cloud principles.

3 Key Cloud Principles and CAD/PLM

According to Benioff, the following 3 principles are absolutely important when you are talking about cloud solutions. Here they are:

1- Portable Logic

2- Portable Data

3- Open API

I found these three principles resonated with some of my thoughts about how CAD/PLM cloud solutions can be organized. Yesterday, I was discussing Autodesk cloud announcements. Few weeks ago, I was trying cloud solutions from Dassault. It is very interesting to see if we can apply these 3 key cloud principles to CAD/PLM cloud solutions. Here are my initial thoughts.

Portable Logic

Nobody in CAD /PLM world is talking about portable logic. I believe this level of details is not available (at least to me). Both, Autodesk and Dassault are claiming to leverage Amazon’s AWS, which means for me virtualization on the level of server environment and not on the level of business logic and components.

Portable Data

This is even more interesting. Is it possible to get data from Autodesk cloud and place it to Dassault cloud? If we talk about CAD, we will be going back to discussions about CAD formats. If we talk about PDM/PLM solutions, the situation can be even more complex. Each data-management solution relies on proprietary data schema and servers. When it still not clear what will be core cloud data management solution for Autodesk, Dassault already announced that Enovia V6 is a platform to be used for all Dassault cloud products. How to make Enovia V6 data portable is another interesting question to discuss.

Open API.

It is, probably, the easiest topic and CAD/PLM providers are dealing with this already many years. A really interesting question – how many of APIs will be available on the cloud? I wasn’t able to find this information either.

What is my conclusion? I think CAD/PLM cloud battle is yet to come. Autodesk and Dassault are two major players on this scene and they are just gathering capabilities and checking arsenals of their cloud solutions. I’d expect next few years to be especially interesting to see how CAD/PLM vendors will develop cloud solutions and test it on their existing and future customers. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Collaborative PLM and Oracle 2011 Targets

January 3, 2011

I’ve read the following article Oracle butts into online collaboration space with Cloud Office. It struck me as something important. Forget about Google vs. Microsoft online wars. It seems to me Oracle is not only thinking about Fusion Apps, but started to understand the value of seamless collaboration on the level of documents and spreadsheets. This can be an interesting move. Oracle announces Cloud Office. Here is what written on Oracle website:

Oracle Cloud Office is a Web and mobile office suite. It includes word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and more. Based on Web open standards and the Open Document Format (ODF), Oracle Cloud Office enables Web 2.0-style collaboration and mobile document access and ensures compatibility with Microsoft Office file documents. Oracle Cloud Office is integrated with Oracle Open Office, which enables rich offline editing of complex presentation, text, and spreadsheet documents.

I found the following video interesting:

You can get some more information from Oracle Cloud Office data sheet. The following picture caught my interest. Oracle Cloud Office SaaS architecture.

Oracle PLM portfolio

Oracle’s PLM-related story includes few interesting facts that, in my view, need to be pulled together. After Agile PLM Software acquisition in 2007, Oracle boosted their PLM capabilities. In addition to Agile, Oracle also acquiredCimetry Systems – a provider of AutoVue viewer and collaborative application. During the last few years, I can see a constant effort from Oracle to develop PLM-oriented business apps as part of Oracle Fusion technology and strategy.

What is my conclusion? I think, Oracle focus to the collaborative application in style Oracle Cloud office , can be an interesting benefit for PLM implementations. The amount of Excel spreadsheets in PLM is huge and growing. The ability to handle them as part of the Oracle portfolio can provide some benefits to companies already paying a lot to Oracle. However, it might not bring new PLM customers to Oracle and they will follow Microsoft SharePoint PLM path. What is your opinion?

Best, Oleg

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PLM Prompt: The Future of PLM Platforms

July 9, 2009

oracle platformThe following press release two days ago drove my attention. Kalypso, the world’s premier innovation consulting firm, announces the launch of PLM Vivo, a new pre-configured product lifecycle management (PLM) solution designed for the food and beverage industry. If you dig inside you find out that Vivo built on top of Oracle Agile PLM for Process.

From the same press release -PLM Vivo comes configured with Kalypso templates, workflows, core data, and profiles specific to the food and beverage industry that is based on best-in-class implementation practices. The pre-configured PLM Vivo solution not only reduces setup time, it also provides a straightforward path for legacy data migration, enables rapid business process documentation, and facilitates swift user adoption.

So, my PLM prompt today is maybe we have a future trend toward separation into PLM platforms providers and providers of pre-configured out of the box applications providing focused industry knowledge? Just my thoughts… what do you think?

Oleg.

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PLM Prompt: WebCenter vs. SharePoint for PLM?

July 7, 2009

I was reading Oracle Web Center announcement few days ago. Browsing top down on Oracle web site, I found it very similar to SharePoint presnetation from new Microsoft SharePoint website (actually interesting side note – SharePoint web site runs on SharePoint).  Web Center announcment came together with Microsoft Social Enterprise vision, published during Enterprise 2.0 conference last week.

Oracle Web Center

Oracle Web Center

Microsoft SharePoint

Microsoft SharePoint

Interesting combination of facts – Oracle already have dedicated PLM product (Agile PLM) as part of their portfolio. Some of PLM vendors made their commitments and released SharePoint oriented portfolios. Now, my thoughts- what platform will be more beneficial for Product Lifecycle Management?

What do you think about it?

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Posted by olegshilovitsky

PLM Prompt: Value of PLM Vertical Solutions

July 1, 2009

Short prompt on interesting Oracle partners push to more specialized veriticals. PLM is one of them. It confirms Product Lifecycle Management value for customers and shows hight margins of PLM solutions in protfolios of big enterprise vendors (Oracle, SAP, IBM etc…).

I’d expect interest of big enterprise in specialized PLM solutoins. Just my opinion…

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Posted by olegshilovitsky

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