What 2012 holds for Product Lifecycle Management?

January 3, 2012

Beginning of the year is a time for New Year resolutions and "annual predictions". Few days ago, I shared my plans forBeyond PLM activities in 2012. To predict what is going to happen during coming year is usually very thankless work. In the middle of December, I’ve made my broad prediction that 2012 is going to be a year of PLM rock stars (ready my post The Enterprise and PLM will rock in 2012). Today, I want to share what I think will be in a focus of PLM companies in coming 2012.

Autodesk Cloud PLM

With no doubt, it is going to be "the PLM event" of the year. Autodesk is going to make Nexus 360 Cloud PLM available in the end of Q1/2012 or beginning of Q2. That was my impression from AU2011. The expectations are high and the level of speculation about what Autodesk will release is going to be on the same level. It is going to be a big challenge for Autodesk. Even if the majority of their initial customers are SMB manufacturers, because of volume, Autodesk can potentially generate much bigger numbers from their PLM products. However, Autodesk needs to watch carefully the level of expectation and the delivery to keep the promise of making PLM different.

Dassault SolidWorks V6

It seems to me, we are going to see SolidWorks V6 preview later this year during SWW 2012. Over the past two years, we’ve heard lots of pre-announcements from SolidWorks about their cloud platforms, Enovia-based development and future use of CATIA kernel. I believe some deliveries need to happen in February in San-Diego (SWW 2012 home town)

PLM Maturity and Unification by mindshare vendors

Top 3 major PLM providers – Dassault, Siemens PLM and PTC will continue their competition for platform unification and big names wins. These days, all large manufacturers are using pieces of software from one of these companies. In many cases, companies are using software from multiple vendors. All 3 vendors are coming with the idea how unify PLM implementations using their proprietary platforms. It becomes very complicated for large companies to keep going with multiple platforms. The trend of "unification" on a single platform will continue in 2012. Because of a very high cost of change, top PLM companies will continue to do all possible to convince customers to commit towards migration to new platforms. We are going to see more of such wins in 2012.

Emerging Trends: Social and Mobile

Even if both "social" and "mobile" are hot outside of PLM, I don’t believe these two words will generate big news in 2012 for PLM. After all, these two trends (or technologies) are just enablers for PLM implementations. I expect to see more mobile applications coming from existing and new vendors.

Product and Technological Shopping

I also expect main CAD/PLM vendors to continue their shopping spree. Money is not an issue for them. Even if the amount of new companies in the industry is not big, four dominant CAD/PLM companies will try to gain advantages by acquiring smaller companies with proven products or interesting technologies.

What is my conclusion? Enterprise has a potential to become "cool again" in 2012. There are many interesting things going outside of enterprise in consumer software and web development. These products and technologies can put enterprise IT on fire in 2012. Large scale data management, social web and mobile – these technological enablers will be dominant in the new PLM development in 2012. Mature software vendors will continue their fight for the future market share increase among their existing (and overlapped) install base. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image: Vlado / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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PLM Cloud: differentiation or “anti-cloud rant”?

December 22, 2011

After my publication PLM, Autodesk and Cloud Wars Club few days ago, I received few comments from my readers trying to figure out what is PLM vendors’ position with regards to the cloud. One of them, even tried to rank PLM companies on how they committed (or not) to the future of cloud computing. The funniest comment was by Jonathan Scott of Razorleaf – "I am waiting for someone at Siemens or PTC to come out with the "anti-Cloud rant" much like Carl Bass’ "anti-PLM" rant". About a year ago, I was writing about PLM vendors and cloud strategies. You can navigate to the followinglink to read my post from the last year. I think, some movements happened since that time, so I decided to make a second check on major PLM vendors about what they do on the cloud.

I’ve been reading an interesting article earlier this week. The Cloud: Worrying about the wrong things? written by Peter Bilello of CIMData. Peter is talking about different elements of cloud strategies and PLM. It is a good read, and I recommend you to spend few minutes and have a read. My favorite passage is about security, which is considered one of the biggest concerns of cloud software. Here is the quote:

IT chiefs in both the private and public sectors and some Internet industry analysts may be overly concerned about security. Worrisome Internet security breaches, though rare, are widely reported. By law, banks, credit card companies, and other online repositories of financial and personal data must report breaches. Two big outages were front-page news in April 2011: Amazon Web Service’s Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) was down for a couple of days. Sony’s PlayStation Network was out for five weeks…. Amazon put its EC2 data loss at 0.07—seven-hundredths—of one percent. Some perspective: information online expands exponentially while the number of digital break-ins grows far more slowly. Adding in less nefarious security lapses, system errors, and human error still does not boost these problems out of the rare category

Another interesting passage about security is coming from Rackspace:

“Security is security, in the cloud or anywhere else,” according to Web hosting company Rackspace US Inc. in San Antonio, Texas. In a 2011 white paper titled, Five Reasons Why the Cloud is Ready for the Enterprise, Rackspace points out, “The same security issues apply to an enterprise data center or on-premise application as to the cloud. Everyone must be vigilant about security, no matter where their data is stored.”

Autodesk

It is clear, Autodesk is taking the cloud story as a major differentiation. As I mentioned yesterday in my post, Autodesk sees themselves "Cloud PLM" similar to how Salesforce.com can be recognized as "Cloud CRM". Autodesk introduced multiple products on the cloud. Their latest Autodesk Nexus PLM 360 supposed to be available somewhere between Q1 and Q2 next year. Here is Buzz Kross quote from Nexus PLM announcement last month:

"Our approach to PLM is a sharp contrast to the decades old technology in the market today," said Robert "Buzz" Kross, senior vice president, Manufacturing Industry Group at Autodesk. "Autodesk 360 for PLM will enable customers of all sizes to achieve the full promise of PLM with a scalable, configurable and intuitive solution. We believe it will help our customers achieve a measurable competitive advantage through better, more accessible collaboration and business information management."

Dassault System

DS is passionate about their cloud online platform. I’ve been reviewing what DS is doing about that during Dassault customer conference (DSCC 2011) last months in Las-Vegas. Enovia V6 is a power horse behind Dassault cloud story. Read my post from DSCC 2011 by navigating on this link. Here is the quote:

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.

Siemens PLM

Siemens is providing a very modest cloud story. As a year ago, I wasn’t able to find many references on what is Siemens PLM cloud strategy. Few announcements and press releases I found pointing on the work Siemens PLM is doing with Microsoft Azure cloud platform. Navigate to the following Siemens’ press release – Siemens PLM Software to Create Industry’s First Quality Management Solution "in the Cloud". Here is the quote. Siemens

announced a joint project with Microsoft Corporation to create the PLM industry’s first cloud computing-based quality management solution. The solution will utilize Microsoft Windows Azure™ platform cloud computing services to securely run Siemens PLM Software’s Dimensional Planning and Validation (DPV) application, showing how cloud computing can enable a world-class quality management application to be cost effectively accessed and leveraged on an as-needed basis.

PTC

From my standpoint, PTC is probably less than other PLM vendors is focusing on how the cloud reshapes PLM industry. PTC was one of the first pioneering Whidchill availability as a hosted solution via IBM. However, besides that, I haven’t seen anything about future cloud product coming from PTC. Interesting enough, I was listening for Jim Heppelmann during Creo launch event in the beginning of 2011. According to this article, here is PTC’s opinion about cloud and other PLM vendors.

While Autodesk and Dassault Systemes appear to be running headlong into developing cloud-based applications, my recent conversations with PTC representatives indicated that, as customers were not asking for it and the benefits were not clear, PTC was not heading to the cloud anytime soon. Given the error in underestimating the move to Windows, I asked Heppelmann for his view of CAD on the cloud.

Here is the passage from Jim’s quote provided in the interview to Develop3D journal:

“So, we identified these key problems and then if I say, well which of those problems does the cloud solve? It doesn’t actually solve any of those problems! It solves some other problems – perhaps ease of installation, perhaps cost of ownership, things like that. But I’m not sure those are the key problems. So we’re not pro-cloud or anti-cloud, we’re just trying to solve what we see as the biggest problems, and we don’t see solutions to these biggest problems being in any magical way enabled by cloud technology.

What is my conclusion? Here is my summary about how leading CAD/PLM companies see their cloud strategies. Autodesk is the only one that built on top of the cloud as a differentiation factor. Dassault announced Enovia V6 platform as a true cloud online platform. Despite the fact Enovia platform has deep roots in Matrix One technology developed in the end of 90s, I believe DS invested a lot of resources to re-shape MatrixOne technologies. TeamCenter shows some interesting and trying cloud water with research projects. PTC is strongly neutral the cloud. As you can see all are different. It will be interesting to see how these strategies are evolving and adopted by customers. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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ERP vs. PLM: More Competition in The Future?

August 11, 2011

Finally, my vacation over and Beyond PLM is back to normal. While screening materials, the following title caught my attention: ERP vs. PLM: What’s the difference? WhichPLM? is sharing a free copy of BMS whitepaper with this catching topic. A relatively short publication (7 pages including the cover and contact page) will take you to the explanation about what is ERP and what is PLM with examples about roles of these systems. Navigate to the following link, download the document. The whitepaper was available at the time I visited it without any registration. Have a read and make your opinion. In the beginning, the white paper quote Tom Shoemaker (PTC VP Marketing) by saying:

PLM is to your intellectual property, what ERP is to your physical property. In other words, PLM focuses on the planning before you commit to making a product, and ERP take over from there. Both systems, however, often require customization and their functions could overlap from one company to the next. For instance, some PLM platforms have been expanded both upstream and downstream, thus taking overlap. Some functions formerly thought to be the domain of ERP.

However, the following passage is the most remarkable, in my view:

The type and brand of data management software that you use will determine how PLM and ERP function. Some will allow for extensive integration between the two, other systems may be able to perform all necessary functions on their own without integration. Some systems are customizable and scalable, others are “out of the box.” How Your company implements these systems also determines, to a large degree, how they will operate.

The discussion about differences between PLM and ERP in this white paper reminded me one of my old posts from the last year – PLM vs. ER: Weird or Different? Even so, I discussed few very specific differentiations, in my view, it becomes less relevant in a business word. Companies are making their choices on what system will dominate (PLM or ERP) based on the multiple set of criteria. The choice of the implementer as well as broad IT platform becomes more and more important. At the same time, implementation of both ERP and PLM system can skyrocket the overall investment in the implementation.

What is my conclusion? I think we are going to face an increased competition between ERP and PLM vendors in a near future. The overlap between these two domains becomes more and more obvious. With the increased business objectives, PLM companies and stepping into the ERP territory in the spaces related to business aspects of PLM. At the same time, ERP companies are increasing their ability to handle and maintain engineering and product design data, which will put under a big question mark the potential implementation of PLM. Just my thoughts… What is your take on this? I’m interested in your opinion.

Best, Oleg

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PLM Think Tank July – Top 5

July 6, 2011

The big weekend finally over and this is a time to get back on track with a long list of blogging topics. The weekend was well spent reading my feeds andmaking photo activities. Obviously, if you take a photo camera in your hands on 4th of July it is about picturing fireworks. So did I and I would love to share fewshots from this weekend with you.

Now, let’s move to my regular Top 5 posts for the last month.

My Experience with Dassault V6 PLM Cloud on Amazon

This post in a short period of time became a leader. I think, people’s interest to the Cloud and Dassault is significant. Dassault Systems is definitely pioneering in the development of PLM applications on the cloud. They are probably the first mindshare PLM vendors potentially making cloud available for a mainstream. The idea is cool – you subscribe, pay money or make a trial subscription and… magic happens. The overall impression I’ve got – it is something new. There are lots of small missing pieces, which are probably normal in the first release. In my view, time is now the most critical aspect for Dassault engineers – the idea is cool, but the details are what important in Web 2.0 environment.

Aras PLM lines up against Windchill, Enovia, and TeamCenter

This is long time leader. Aras is definitely moving towards crossing paths with PLM like Windchill, Enovia, TeamCenter. Is it possible to displace large PLM system with Aras today? My answer – it depends. The PLM implementation scope is varied, and every implementation can be different. Therefore, I specially liked the community oriented approach of development. This is something that can make a difference. On the side of platforms and integrations – time will show if Aras will find a balance between throwing resources and effective delivery. This is a big challenge.

Thinking About PLM on the Planet PTC Live

My posts from PlanetPTC raised a lot of interesting. PTC made rock solid show in Las Vegas. The team shows integrity and was well orchestrated. I was impressed by a keynote and demo provided by Brian Shepherd. It was clean and except of some problems with PTC Social Links was running smoothly. Some of live demo were very impressive. PTC execs were achievable and schedule was flexible. High speed internet can be a big plus and can improve the quality and streamlining of the information. I’m going to blog later today and tomorrow and share my thoughts about PTC strategy. Especially interesting for me was everything related to the Windchill 10 and associated presentation of “single point of truth”.

Future Promises and Concerns about PTC after Planet PTC Live

Another post (conclusion) from PlanetPTC. I found Planet PTC very energetic and enjoyed communicating with the executive and marketing team. Two days wasn’t enough to get connected to many people, but I found online community (and especially the community on tweeter) very active, and I’m looking forward to staying connected on the blog, tweeter and other social net. I think some of the things PTC is thinking and working about are very promising and following industry demands. At the same time, the strategy is still lacking some fundamental decisions related to how PLM improves the work with the rest of enterprise software. Another element of the concern is related to the scalability of solutions for different companies. My take – one size doesn’t fit all in manufacturing industry. It shows some promise in Creo Apps, but not reflected in anything else.

Design To Manufacturing Process: Bumpy Road?

This topic is ***just*** important. The space of design to the manufacturing solution is complex and not covered well, in my view. The demand from customers is significant and the same time the requirements are complicated and solution in a most situation needs to be tailored for every customer. Most of the software vendors are talking about design to manufacturing processes and, at the same time, moving integration to partners, service providers and 3rd parties.

Best, Oleg

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PTC Social Link and SharePoint: What the Future Holds?

June 17, 2011

One of the products I had a chance to review more closely earlier this week was PTC Social Link. I had a chance to post about social technologies before. Navigate your browser to the following links to read my earlier blog articles. Social PLM, Collaboration and Structured Discussion; PLM and Social Technologies Dating? Social Enterprise Discussion and Next Collaboration Buzz.

The following video provides a quick round trip for what PTC Social Link can do. Watch it and make your conclusion. I found it educational. According to the information PTC provided earlier this week, they are using Social Link internally to improve product development processes.

Activities

I found "an activity" concept interesting. Watch the following screen shot. As an engineer or a person in the organization you are interesting about what activities are running around a particular CAD model, drawing or similar piece of data. Social link gives you a summary view of activities placed alongside to this data.

Social Link, Technology and Web Parts

PTC is using SharePoint to implement Social Link. I can see some advantages in taking a leverage of Microsoft technological stack. SharePoint provides a good platform and Social Link leverage existing user experience, infrastructure and customization capabilities. To give you a glimpse of what is possible, navigate to the following link and read SharePoint 2007 Automatically updated web parts post. Web Parts is one of the fundamental elements of SharePoint technologies and Social Link uses it as well. However, if you don’t have in your team people familiar with SharePoint, this advantage can become a problem. It is your choice, of course.

What is my conclusion? PTC is thinking about social technologies. Social Link follows social hype, and you can find similarities with products like Salesforce.com Chatter, SAP StreamWork, Vuuch and some others. The question I’m asking myself is what should be the preference of users in a company if they will have a choice between SAP, PTC and other "social technology" applications. My intuitive hunch is that integration with product content (i.e. CAD files, BOM, etc.) can be important. Just my thoughts.

Best, Oleg

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Future Promises and Concerns about PTC after Planet PTC Live

June 16, 2011

Picture-18.pngAs you probably know, I spent the beginning of the week in Las-Vegas attending Planet PTC Live 2011. Those of my readers who follow me on Twitter already paid attention on the overflow of tweets and absence of posts. Yesterday night catching my red-eye flight to Boston, I started to put some of my initial thoughts about what I’ve seen at PTC Live.

Thinking About Apps

One of the fundamental changes I can observe within PTC move to Creo is establishing of Apps sitting on top of the configurable platform and sharing common working environment. The original idea is probably not unique. The idea of workbenches, desktops, suites and many others was before in enterprise software. However, the initial set of apps and future plans shows good understanding of customer needs and easy flow. The devil is in details, and I can see next months of working with a broader set of customers interesting.

Windchill 10 and Usability

The problem is usability is an important one. Among the use communities, PLM is often associated with the complexity of user experience, cumbersome user interface, long and complicated learning curve. PTC definitely recognized the problem and presented some ideas in Windchill. The Windchill 10 UI looks much better compared to what I had a chance to see before. However, at the same the overall Windows UI looks complicated.

Mobile and Cloud

These two topics are trending these days. I see them as very important things. I liked Windchill Mobile application presented by Brian Shepherd iPad. My favorite feature was the way to work with assembly decomposition on parts. It is pretty cool. The interest to mobile is very high these days, and it is a good sign to see PTC jumping to the PLM mobile race.

Picture-19.png

Cloud is another thing that I’m discussing a lot on my blog. I’ve heard PTC talking about the cloud as a "deployment option". You can deploy to Amazon, Azure, etc. I think, the cloud topic is broader than just deployment and includes other aspects such as multi-tenancy, parallelism and some others.

Social "Things"

PTC introduced Windchill Social Link earlier last year. The trend for social application is strong. I can see almost all enterprise vendors are working on social apps these days. Salesforce.com Chatter, SAP StreamWork and others. What is the differentiation between SAP social app and PTC social app for a specific customer? How they work together? How many social applications do we need in a single manufacturing enterprise? All these valid questions and need to be answered.

Microsoft

I had a chance to speak with people at PTC working on the partnership with Microsoft. PTC is strong Microsoft’s customer, and I’ve seen multiple examples of common Microsoft / PTC technologies working together. At the same time, it will be interesting how PTC customers will be moving to the "post-PC" era. Life was simple with regards to platform supports last 10-15 years. Similar to "a fashion world", we are moving to multi-platform world now again. This is an interesting time to watch.

SharePoint

PTC is presenting strong support related to SharePoint technologies. At the same time, the information about discontinuation of Windchill ProductPoint shows that something is wrong here. PTC retiring ProductPoint. According to the plan, ProductPoint was providing a support for smaller manufacturing companies. The ubiquitous access to information, well know user experience (shared with Windows) was a foundation for success. Navigate to the following link to learn what is my opinion about that. After few conversations with PTC people, my conclusion about ProductPoint retiring is positive. There is nothing wrong is trying the water and pushing back. SharePoint still remains the platform many companies are relying on. At the same time, customers need to asses carefully their spending before going to SharePoint journey.

One Size Does Fit All

There is something that related to the PLM vendors work with smaller manufacturing companies. Very often, vendors are calling it SMB. Without neccarily going to clarify what actually SMB means, my concern is in the way PLM solutions can scale between all companies. I’m personally not a supporter of ‘one size fits all’ approach. In my view, it doesn’t work in other places, and it shouldn’t work for PLM as well. However, to balance between multiple solutions is somewhat that always was hard to PLM vendors. Maybe the idea of Apps can be a good here. So, today I can see some holes in the PTC solutions targeting smaller manufacturing companies.

Complexity

Unfortunately, PLM has a strong association with a word "complex". PLM companies are doing well in this space, as I can see that. The complication of core functionality multiplies with complexity of customer environments, need to provide tailored solution and smooth deployment create the feeling of "messy PLM projects" nobody wants to be involved in. I think, this is still a painful topic, and it is not much addressed by PTC specifically and PLM industry in general.

Integration

We are not living in a world of a single software vendor. Companies are using lots of application and software suites these days. Design, Engineering, Manufacturing, Supply chain, etc. The number is huge and every company is using dozens and hundred applications to get job done. It is a very important goal for PLM product to be connected and interplay with these products. Unfortunately, the dominant idea of "master data" is what used by PTC (and other vendors here). I’ve been attending a session related to PLM-ERP integration during the event and found topics that remain open for the last 10-15 years. The solution proposed here has strong reliance on "workshops" and "people agreement" in a company. Remember – technology is simple, but people are hard. Pushing a solution towards people agreement about how to integrate systems makes it very complicated, in my eyes.

Single Point of Truth

The last, but not the least one. The concept of a single point of truth is strong and heavily supported by PTC / Windchill. This concept remains with us for the last 10-15 years in PLM and maybe even more before with ERP and other enterprise software. My take on this is simple – there is no single point of truth. Company is complicated and it is impossible to have everything synchronized and working as a single whole. Even if a company can do it, it will remain valid only for the next 5 minutes. Next change will disrupt it again. The cost of change is tremendous and companies cannot afford that. Something needs to be changed here.

What is my conclusion? I found Planet PTC very energetic and enjoyed communicating with the executive and marketing team. Two days wasn’t enough to get connected to many people, but I found online community (and especially the community on tweeter) very active, and I’m looking forward to staying connected on the blog, tweeter and other social net. I think some of the things PTC is thinking and working about are very promising and following industry demands. At the same time, the strategy is still lacking some fundamental decisions related to how PLM improves the work with the rest of enterprise software. Another element of the concern is related to the scalability of solutions for different companies. My take – one size doesn’t fit all in manufacturing industry. It shows some promise in Creo Apps, but not reflected in anything else. This is just my opinion, of course.

Best, Oleg
Disclosure: PTC paid for registration and hotel during the event.

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Thinking About PLM on the Planet PTC Live -Day 1

June 14, 2011

I’m attending PTC Live 2011 event these days in HOT Las Vegas. Actually, you have no chance to feel Las Vegas weather when you are on the conference. Hotels and huge casinos environment are hiding windows, sunshine and the feeling of time. I’ve been doing live tweeting during the day, so if you want to feel a live pulse of PTC event, you can follow my tweets and Planet PTC tweet stream on PlanetPTC11. In addition to that, I’ve been sharing my photo stream via tweeter. You can get the access to this photo stream by navigating to the following link.

What is on the table?

PTC rocked the event with 3 major announcements – Creo 1.0 general availability, MKS acquisition and Windchill 10.0. Each of these events are significant enough. Creo 1.0 is long awaited and pre-announced before during PTC Lightning Event last year. MKS is a huge step towards the ability to manage a software development process. Windchill is “the biggest in the history” Windchill release. Now, some more details and thoughts.

Creo 1.0

Long anticipated release of Creo 1.0 was announced. Subset of Creo Apps became available today. Here is the list of Creo 1.0 apps and few screenshots I made during the presentation. I recommend you to take a deeper review about Creo 1.0 Apps by navigating on SolidSmack blog.

Creo Parametric –For “history-based” modeling with direct and free-form modeling capability.
Creo Direct – For “history-free” direct modeling to interact directly with the 3D geometry.
Creo Simulate – A simulation app for thermal and finite element analysis.
Creo Illustrate – An technical illustration app for communicating model info graphically in 3D.
Creo Schematics – An app for creating 2D routed systems diagrams, like cabling and piping.
Creo View MCAD – An app to view, interrogate, and mark up MCAD geometry.
Creo View ECAD – An app to viewer tailored for electronics.
Creo Sketch – An app to capture design ideas in 2D. (available July 2011)
Creo Layout – An app for early concept layout work in 2D, used for 3D. (available Nov 2011)

PTC is laying down few interesting concepts together with Creo 1.0. One of the most significant is Creo Common Data model. I had a conversation with Mike Campbell about Creo Apps and some aspects of Creo 1.0 architecture. Common Data Model (don’t be confused with anything related to databases) is about common infrastructure to handle CAD models and interoperability between Creo Apps. According to Mike, PTC is planning to release Creo common data model later in next coming releases to allow 3rd party developers to access Creo Apps data and making some manipulation.

Windchill 10.0

The original date of Windchill release was about 10 months ago. However, PTC was talking a lot about the significance of this event including significant (~$100M) R&D investment, lots of code re-writing and completely re-designed user experience. PTC surprised me by saying that they had a chance to discuss and review Windchill UI with some authorities in the world of UX (User Experience) – Steve Krug. Take a look on the following few pictures showing the Windchill UI compliance with Windows User Interface concepts.

I

I will try to provide more examples and links to high-resolution pictures later on.

Mobile, Cloud and more…

PTC lands few surprises in this space of mobile and joined the race of PLM iOS mobile application announcements. Two mobile apps were presented today – Windchill and Arbotext mobile apps. By doing this PTC completely disconnects from Windows Application stack and movement to the future Win8, iOS and Android devices. In addition to that, PTC made minor announcement about availability of Windchill on the cloud platform – Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure.

The Atmosphere

If you like Las Vegas, you can find the environment of the event very enjoyable. Caesars Palace is one of the biggest hotels can entertain you 24x7x365 days for the rest of your life (or until your pockets will be completely empty. I’m not a big fun of gambling, so can say nothing about that experience.

What is my conclusion? PTC made rock solid show today. The team shows integrity and was well orchestrated. I was impressed by a keynote and demo provided by Brian Shepherd. It was clean and except of some problems with PTC Social Links was running smoothly. Some of live demo were very impressive. PTC execs were achievable and schedule was flexible. High speed internet can be a big plus and can improve the quality and streamlining of the information. I’m going to blog later today and tomorrow and share my thoughts about PTC strategy. Especially interesting for me was everything related to the Windchill 10 and associated presentation of “single point of truth”.

Best, Oleg

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PLM, SharePoint and ProductPoint Lessons

May 5, 2011

I’m following SharePoint and PLM. One of point of my interest was to analyze how Microsoft SharePoint can be used in PDM/PLM as a technological platform and business driver. Going back in 2009, I posted SharePoint PLM Paradox?. The potential of SharePoint was promising. The potential realization of this business opportunity for PLM companies was interesting.

SharePoint: Shifting Gears

I was watching SharePoint development for the last few years. I’ve seen the highest level of excitement related to SharePoint 2007. Technology was okay. SharePoint huge success came from free distribution of WSS (Windows SharePoint Services). I’ve seen many companies jumping onto SharePoint opportunity to solve their problems in collaboration, files sharing and portal solution. Coming to 2010-2011, I heard a different perception with regards to SharePoint. I posted – PLM SharePoint: Silver Bullet of Fierce Criticism? The most visible piece of the conclusion was related to heavy dependencies of SharePoint development projects on consulting and services during the deployment and operation.

What is the point of Windchill Product Point?

Few days I discovered the following note in Pro-Engineer forum related to PTC and ProductPoint. Navigate your browser to this link. It was available at the time I wrote this post. According to the information on this forum and PTC ProductPoint Retirement FAQ – PTC is retiring Windchill ProductPoint and providing current customers with the opportunity to upgrade their Windchill ProductPoint licenses to Windchill PDMLink for no additional charge through December 31, 2012. This information made me think about potential lessons PLM industry can learn from trying to combine PLM and SharePoint in a single product.

These are my initial 5 points:

1. SharePoint is a technological platform that requires implementation and services. To use it for small manufacturing companies can be dangerous and depends on deployment configuration can be problematic.

2. Microsoft business interest is to deploy SharePoint to bigger companies, and it can be asymmetric with the interest of PLM companies to solve PLM SMB problem using SharePoint.

3. There are alternative ways to solve PLM usability problems rather than re-use SharePoint UI patterns. PTC just released new version of Windchill (10.0), which probably delivers better user experience.

4. Maintenance of multiple PLM products is probably way too complicated.

5. PLM for SMB is probably not only about better user experience and subset of functionality.

Just my thoughts… I’m looking forward to discussing these lessons learned with you and to know what is your take? Based on the conversation I hope to have a better understanding of what can be a potential future of SharePoint and PLM development.

Best, Oleg

Customer_FAQ_-_Windchill_ProductPoint_Retirement_4.27.11.pdf

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PLM Definitions- Multiple Dimensions by Prof. Eigner

April 24, 2011

I’m continue to publish references on various definitions of PLM. A month ago I posted PLM Definition – Corporate vs. Consumer Style presenting a consumer oriented view by Dassault’s and PLM Definition – next round? from PTC. Another interesting definition of PLM comes from Prof. Martin Eigner of the University of Kaiserslautern. Prof. Eigner also known as a founder of Eigner PLM system. Take a look on the following video and make your opinion (video is courtesy of PTC).

Prof. Eigner is talking about three dimensions of PLM integration: Lifecycle, Discipline and Supply Chain.

What is my take? PLM is very often using the context of "integration" when defines what is PLM about. These are very relevant aspects. For me, another, very important aspect of integration is openness. In my view, this is a missing link in many PLM implementations. Later this week I’m going to attend Aras Community Event (ACE 2011) in Detroit. You can follow my twitter and #ArasACE hash tag for more information.

Best, Oleg

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CAD and PLM Vendor Website Traffic

April 6, 2011

Picture-14.pngI was playing around the data I can take from the website Compete.com. You plug the URL of major CAD or PLM vendor and get the information back for free. I found it interesting to compare. In today’s world online traffic can be one of the important elements of a company marketing strategy. Unfortunately, a free version doesn’t work with sub-domains, so some of the companies were not included into my experiments.

My first test was to put Dassault and PTC. These companies are on the top list also as CAD and mindshare PLM vendors. You can see that their traffic is pretty much compatible. You can see the result online navigating on the following link.

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Following my discussion about Autodesk and their potential move into PLM (or MLP) space, my next experiment was to compare mindshare PLM vendors and Autodesk. You can see the result navigating the following link. Now, picture is more interesting. Autodesk and Dassault are companies compatible in terms of revenues. At the same time, Autodesk outperforms Dassault 10 times from the standpoint of traffic.

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My last test was to poke one of the PLM challengers. I picked up Aras and tried to compare their traffic with Dassault. Unfortunately, Compete alerted me that aras.com has a low traffic rate. Nevertheless, I found that results interesting. Dassault and Aras are not compatible in terms of size, but their web traffic is pretty much compatible.

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What is my conclusion? Few years ago, I was reading the book Numerati, by Stephen Baker. The subtitle of the book states – “the must read for anyone who wants to understand life and business in the Google Age“. If you have some free time during the week, read this book. I think, we are coming to the point of time, when the online influence will be become a critical for company business success. Newcomers can use it as power to enter to the business. Large companies can watch it, in order not to lose their significance tomorrow. Important. Just my opinion, of course. YMMV.

Best, Oleg

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Posted by olegshilovitsky

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