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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NoPLM and Quirky Social Product Development

April 12, 2011

Social Product Development. I’ve been talking about that before. PTC Social Link, Vuuch, 3DSwYm. These are names led my previous conversations. You can take a look on some of my previous posts about this topic. It was all about how to improve collaboration and productivity leveraging technologies and experience coming out of social networking and Web 2.0.

Today, I want to bring a different perspective on what "social" means in product development. One of my readers sent me a link to Quirky. The idea of social involvement into the design process seems to me growing. Few examples led me to this place – Amazon Mechanical Turk, Engineering Services Market place GrabCAD and some others. Take a look on short video of Quirky and make your opinion.

What is my take? Product development is facing massive customization. This is what I was thinking about watching the video. "Social" is a tool to make it happen. The question what tools will be at people disposal to make it happen. This is not about "collaborative workflows" anymore. No PLM. This is about new products available online to make it happen… fast. Just my opinion. What do you think?

Best, Oleg

Freebie.

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Moving from PLM to PLMSocial?

March 31, 2011

Social Media and Networking are important. There are vendors in the business world that are paying attention to the importance of "social". Just think about Salesforce’s Radian6 acquisition earlier this week. I can see how business software vendors are trying to hire "social" terms to improve the business and catch attention and focus on different social features. I read InformationWeek article “ Panorama Applies Social Network to Business Intelligence.” Business intelligence is something that definitely requires improvements. Despite the catchy name, normally BI tools are not getting a significant expose in the company and limited their install base to a very small number of people with special "analytical" skills. So, to bring social into this space can be interesting and, in my view, Panorama is trying to accomplish this goal. Here is my favorite passage from the article:

The core differentiator for Necto is the organization of sets of analytic reports, charts, and graphs into workspaces. Like many other BI software vendors, Panorama has supported the concept of personalized dashboards for years, but the workspaces are part of the Necto social BI user interface, where workspaces are sort of like mini-dashboards that can be shared. When you view workspace , profile pictures of the other people who are connected to that workspace are shown across the top of the screen. You can initiate a conversation with someone about the data by dragging their icon onto the analytics screen and sending them a message, which will include a link to the item you want to share or ask a question about.

Now, how do you think it is related to PLM? Simple… PLM is talking about dashboards for years. Nothing happens. Actually, something indeed happens. For a long time, dashboard was a favorite world of PLM marketing people. In reality, dashboards ended up to become a feature that requires deep customization and tailoring of the system. I can see vendors in PLM world are experimenting with various technological innovation. To have an ability to link people’s profile and information is not a new. However, with an updated flavor of social innovation it can catch more attention. PLM vendors and new companies in this space are flirting with Ms. Social and trying to bring more clicks to their website. Dassault 3DSwYm, PTC social product development, Vuuch and maybe some others are on the run to bring "social" to explain what they do.

What is my conclusion? Do you think we are moving from PLM to PLS(Social)? I think, it is important to differentiate "technology" and "technological buzz". Social has a power. People like to watch their friends’ pictures on Facebook and thinking about new Color startup supposing to change a way in photo sharing in small communities. Do you think, the same technology will change the way people work with CAD drawing and Bill of Materials? The adoption of social networking (and associated technologies) is defined primarily by "social interests" in photo sharing and people belonging to the social net. User experience is important. That’s why Salesforce’s Chatter very similar to Facebook UI. Technology is secondary here. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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PLM Reset 2011

January 6, 2011

Winter break is a time to make a traditional "lesson learned" or "next year" blog posts. I wanted to come with some thoughts about what I see happens in the industry and where the biggest shift is going to happen. The name "PLM Reset" comes to my mind as the most appropriate. For the past couple of years, I’ve been listening to quite many stories about how PLM was implemented in many companies. These stories made me think about a strong need to clean up the table of PLM implementations. Something that can improve PLM value proposition and make implementation more efficient.

Enterprise Trends
I can see few important enterprise trends happen now: cloud solutions, mobile enterprise, social and polygamous. All these trends will have a major influence on the future development of engineering and manufacturing systems as well as opportunities in this space.

Cloud Solutions will be one of the enterprise trends in 2011. IDC forecast IT spending will hit 1.6 trillion this year with 13% growth coming from software and services. The biggest growth will be in public cloud services. Cloud is not peripheral solution anymore. In 2010 Google proved that Google’s solutions are secured enough to serve GSA. Additional announcements came from Microsoft and other vendors involved into providing of cloud solutions. In my view, cloud can become a classic disruption story for the enterprise industry and software for engineering and manufacturing (including PLM) can take a significant benefits from that.

Mobile is a definite trend. I can see a tremendous success of iPad, iPhone and other devices. It leads to a lot of additional opportunities and changes in the enterprise landscape. All these devices are not completely ready for enterprise. However, the future development in cloud computing will make them connected to the enterprise cloud grid in a seamless way.

Social is another interesting story. I’ve been writing about social trends many times during the past year. In my view, "social" will be proliferating in organizations and will create a new connection system that will help to communicate in an organization. I can see a significant value of social component to improve PLM collaboration.

End of Microsoft’s dominance is another trend. Until now, most of the software used by enterprise were developed either in Redmond of Redwood Shores. Not anymore. We can see a significant growth in Apple adoption. Businesses are less interested in maintaining existing applications and looking how how to try something new that can help them to solve a problem in a different way. We will see also a massive adoption of software coming from employees.

Building a Simple PLM
In addition to the enterprise trends mentioned above, I can see a strong strive of enterprise organization to simplification. For many years, the complexity took a king role in the business of enterprise organization. In PLM, the complexity was a factor to justify high cost , services and implementations. The traditional PLM mind share in the enterprise – we need to have a complex solution to solve complex problems. Wrong! This is something that will be changed very soon. A very long time ago, Mark Twain wrote – “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” The simplicity is very thought. However, there is no other option these days. It needs to be understood by vendors and customers.

What is my conclusion? In my view, PLM is definitely in the position to re-born. All trends I mentioned above plus a demand for a simpler solution will lead customers to hit "reset" button. "Business as usual" is not an option anymore. The disruption of cloud and influence of other trends will impact PLM and make a future move towards introduction of new solutions in 2011. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Engineering and Social Dashboards

December 21, 2010

I found an interesting article in San-Francisco Gate about Dashboards- “Introducing Netvibes Dashboard Intelligence Solutions: Business Intelligence Reinvented for the Real-Time Web.” I spent some time watching Netvibies video.

Dashboards
The dashboard approach can simplify information consumption. This approach is interesting and you can digest a bigger amount of valuable information in a much easier way. Dashboard is a popular view in engineering software. To provide one, you usually need to spend lots of time to prepare, test, program, etc. To automate this process, can be an interesting solution.

Social
The unique aspect of Netvibes approach is to focus on social information. These days we are overloaded with the amount of information flowing inside of organization. To be able to categorize and present it to a user is what actually needed.

Tagging
Netvibes is using the technology called “SmartTagging” to process social information. An interesting aspect of this approach is how to mix automatictagging with an ability of users to add additional ones.

What is my conclusion? We produce a lot of information inside of outside of organization. How to digest it? Netvibes provide an interesting approach. Do you think a similar approach can work in other applications? I think yes. However, the process to prepare a dashboard for a particular type of data can be long and cumbersome. Not sure I agree with the approach Netvibes is taking. However, this is the place to innovate. Just my view…

Best, Oleg

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Social PLM and Email Lock-in?

December 9, 2010

I found the following WSJ Pool interesting. Will you use your Facebook’s email service as you primary email? You can read about this poll in the following eWeek article. Navigate to this link to read discussion and vote. At the time I voted the result was pretty clear- email is one the most successful lock-in application.

The results of this vote made me think again about the future of collaboration and social PLM. Recently, I wrote about Facebook’s message service – Social PLM Inbox and Changing Paradigms. My conclusion back few weeks ago was clear. Social PLM is taking on email. This is a very ambitious take. The WSJ pool made it clear – email is sticky and despite the huge success of Facebook is still here.

How To Break Email Lock-in?
I was thinking about how social PLM can break email lock-in for the people using email in design collaboration. The social link is a possible ice-breaker. People value ease of use and data connections. The main place where email gets crazy is when you need to connect people’s communication and relevant CAD files. I can see an attempt of companies PLM space to make it happen. PTC Social Link, Dassault Social Innovation, Vuuch. This is my short list of trials.

What is my conclusion? To break an email lock-in can be a big deal. Will it happen or not? People are asking this question all the time. You need to think about really sticky application to make it happen. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Social PLM Inbox and Changing Paradigms

November 19, 2010

The Facebook announcement about introducing of FB messaging system triggered a flood of posts. I’ve been looking over them for the last couple of days. I liked the following one – Locked in paradigms. This is my favorite quote about what Facbook is doing:

I very much get it that this is [Facebook messaging] a lot bigger than email and that’s kind of the point. Facebook apparently isn’t interested in building an email system and because they don’t already have an email system that acts like Gmail or Yahoo Mail they can break free from that paradigm.

Facebook Messaging Paradigm

Take a look on the following video. I found it impressive. The idea of simplification in communication and message tracking is powerful. Facebook is taking on an email paradigm and trying to change it. You don’t need to keep an email address of people you want to talk to. You just look for them on FB and talk. Simple? Yes. However, only if these people are on FB.

Product and Social Context

The battle of Facebook with Google isn’t exactly a topic for my blog. However, the idea of paradigm breaking made me think about some attempts to leverage the power of social business in PLM business. Few days ago, I posted an article about the potential of social systems like 3DSwYm to turn PLM into a mainstream. The key point, in my view, was about how to improve content sharing in the organization to streamline collaboration between people. Chad Jackson of Lifecycle Insights commented in a very interesting way:

With FB as well as many other social computing platforms, the context is always YOU. That assumption enables a whole host of simplifications in terms of the software system. Alternatively, the context in product development isn’t you, it’s the product, a project, a part or so on. That complicates things dramatically because you have to post/submit content to the right context and you also have to subscribe/follow the right context.

I found this a bit confusing. If I’m thinking about communication, it focused on the social aspects of communication. When I’m on FB, I’m communicating with all people and/or friends, depends on my privacy settings. Lately, FB came with the idea of ‘Groups’ which allows to think about community building in a similar way 3DSwYm, Chatter and other are doing. The context of communication is a content I put on Facebook. Alternatively, if I’m communicating with my blog readers, the context is my blog post. By finding an interesting content, I can interact with people on FB, Twitter and other social network.

If I turn it to product development, the picture is absolutely similar. I need to communicate with people. The purpose of my communication is business matters. Product design, changes, discussion, etc. Who is the people I need to communicate? The purpose of a social system is to identify them. If I will think about a system like 3DLive, Windchill Social Link of HD 3D, I can see how people can find who made changes for Assembly, Part, Drawing, etc. System likeVuuch, introduce an interesting way to find who are the people connected to Product, Part, BOM by enabling an explicit creation of these social links. The efficiency of a system to identify who is the right person(s) to talk to will define the overall value of the social system.

Will Social System Take Over the Email?

This is one of the most important questions to ask. Email is simple and dirty. People hate it and use it all the time. Facebook is trying to change this paradigm. They are eliminating the need to handle “email body” – to/cc/bcc/subject, and just communicate with people you’re connected to. Social system like Vuuch, 3DSwYm or Windchill Social Link can probably do the same. I found the following quote in another email by Chad Jackson – Vuuch: A unique approach to social computing is product development.

Centralized correspondence is a significant improvement over email. Despite availability of PLM collaboration capabilities, social media sites and instant messenger, I’ve found that email is the medium used most frequently for this sort of correspondence in product development today. I’ll get into the pitfalls of email for product development correspondence in a future post, but suffice it to say that emails can be forgotten, deleted or lost in your inbox. Use of a centralized server to manage the correspondence means it’s kept as a traceable trail that can be accessed by wider audiences at a later date.

Well, email also operates with a centralized server. Do you think a social system in product development will be able to lock everybody in the same server? My hunch is that this will be a very hard thing to do. Email is reliable because it operates in a virtual space of SMTP servers. Google talked about Wave Servers a year ago. PLM collaboration tried to lock people in a single point of a truth system. I can search in my Gmail. Is it equivalent to a single collaborative server? I don’t think so. However, it is still an email. It is relatively easy to find things in my gmail box. The question of simplicity is important. If “a social” or “whatsoever other system name” will be simpler compared to the email and can find people to collaborate in an easier way than your email inbox, it wins.

What is my conclusion? I can see the goal of a social system is very high and ambitious – to replace our old friend email. Facebook pretends to do so in the internet now. Companies like Vuuch will try to achieve it in a product development space. Google failed to deliver it with Google Wave. To learn this lesson is important. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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3DSwYm: Future PLM Mainstream or Copycat?

November 11, 2010

This week on DSCC 2010 I had a chance to learn more about what Dassault is planing as their next step in the development of their Social Innovation strategies. Dassault presented their interest in social software last year by the following joint announcement with blueKiwi. However, for the moment, Dassault is planning to announce their 3DSwYm social collaborative platform. The announcement will be soon and SwYm (See What You Mean) was largely presented and demonstrated during DSCC 2010. I had a conversation about 3DSwYm with Bruno Dalahaye, Dassault Enovia VP Marketing Strategy. This conversation made me think about what actually 3DSwYm is going to be and how it can impact future PLM development.

Yet Another Social Platform?

“Social” in enterprise is trending. I had a chance to write about it in my blog. I can find multiple examples of social systems created with a strategy of so-called “Enterprise Facebook”. I can just mention few of them. MicrosoftSharePoint 2010 Communities, Cisco Quad, Salesforce.com Chatter, SAP StreamWork, Oracle Beehive. In PLM world, PTC introduced their Social Product Development program with is leveraging Microsoft SharePoint platform.

PLM Mainstream Opportunity

A growing amount of social systems coming from enterprise software vendors introduces a significant challenge to present a system for product development. What can be a potential opportunity? Let me go back to original roots of Facebook, which served groups of people (originally, college alumni) to share pictures, videos and messages. The key point, in my view in converting of Facbook to a mainstream social network was Facebook’s ability to share content and messages in a very easy way. Connectivity is also playing an important role as well as the ability easy to find connections.

One of the biggest PLM problem and, at the same time, opportunity is related to the ability of PLM to become a mainstream system. Today, PLM implementations challenging most of the organization from the standpoint of ease of use and ability of all people in the organization to stay connected and to communicate. This is a potential sweet spot for 3DSwYm. The following picture presents a fragment of 3DSwYm demo on DSCC2010.

Content is a King

Content is a very important factor. Think about the internet and social networks. Content play an important role in the ability of systems to drive people’s attention. Pictures, Photos, Videos, Podcasts, Blogs – these are examples of content that drives people’s interest in the internet. However, in manufacturing organization, content is represented by designs, Bill of Materials and other elements of product data. The ability to expose this product data is the ultimate opportunity of Social Innovation system to be used by people. Main competitor is old fashioned email. Email rocks in organizations. Most of the decisions, communications and collaboration are driven by email. However, email is not content-friendly. So, social systems have an advantage. Dassault has very deep roots in 3D content. This is an opportunity, Dassault can use to support their 3DSwYm initiatives in the organization.

What is my conclusion? Social systems have a potential to connect people in the organization. The social-connection is a strong factor. People are connecting to other people based on their organization responsibilities, relations to project, teams and groups. Social system has a potential to drive people’s communication in product development. Content is a king. By enabling 3D content share, systems like 3DSwYm may have a bright future in the organization. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg

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Social Intranet and PLM Apps

November 1, 2010

One of the very interesting trends in the modern IT, I’m observing these days is adopting consumer technologies in the enterprise. In general, I can see Information technologies are in the crossroad of decisions about how to adopt fast growing technologies coming from consumer space. Two of them which have the biggest influence is social intranet and mobility. I had a chance to read Dion Hinchcliffe’s Making Enterprise Application Social article. You can have a read and make your opinion. In my view, Dion is coming very close to the point of how multiple enterprise platforms will be adopting social capabilities.

Walled Garden of Enterprise Apps

These days, large product suites are dominant in the enterprise. For the last 10 years, big enterprise software providers made a big number of acquisitions. It was a very natural way. Customers demand vertical integration and was interested to work with fewer numbers of suppliers. Service organizations got their preferences in work with multiple platform and enterprise application providers. The integration between enterprise application was complicated and was covered for service organizations. Horizontal application suites such as Business Process Management were focused on how to get vertical applications delivered to customers.

Intranet, Social Identity and Apps Stores

The following pic from Dion’s blog presented an interesting view on the direction, enterprise application landscape will be moving. The key role in this landscape change belongs to changes in Intranet organization.

In my view, the key word here is "disintegration". Opposite to a very strong trend of vertical integration, disintegration will introduce social identity and related to these standards like OpenSocial as a mechanism to break enterprise product suites into Enterprise App Stores. I think, we are in the early beginning of this process. However, enterprise company are starting to get this point. For most of them today, is just an understanding of the fact Large Monolithic PLM Implementations are A Thing of the Past.

PLM App Store Crossroads

What all this mean for PLM products? For the last few years, PLM vendors made a significant effort in integration of application portfolios. It was positive from the standpoint of their optimization. It resulted in large portfolios of applications focused on product development processes. I think, PLM vendors started to understand the importance of granular approach to application suites. I can see the intro of PTC Creo AnyRole as a first sign in the overall Applification movement. I can see other PLM vendors are standing in the crossroad to decide what will be the future portfolio and product organization. In my view, understanding of vendors like Jive and Jive Market, can provide additional ideas.

What is my conclusion? Social intranet can become a mechanism to break walled garden of massive enterprise platforms. We are still far from this point. However, I’d expect to see some fast mover in this space. Openness to the social intranet is a key to survive in the future world of enterprise application. The standard like Open Social, can be a first natural way to connect pieces of enterprise applications, including PLM, in future Enterprise App Stores. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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