Open PLM – A Climb For Losers?

It would seem that there are some real negative press surrounding open systems. I wounder if it is coming from the users or the vendors. I’m sure the vendors are afraid of giving away the store. Users may have some concerns over long term supportability of open systems. In my experience, software that exists in a stable form in unsupportable regardless of whether it is open source or vendor backed. Evolve or die is the name of the game. I have seen implementations where source code was decompiled and reverse engineered because the user wanted a change that the vendor was unwilling to make. Is it better to have open source which may be modified by the use in ways unknown to the vendor, or to deploy inflexible software which is consistent and therefor easier to support? We could argue the pros and cons of each approach indefinitely. Good change management helps. Realistically, companies have to contain their PLM budgets. Anything is possible given enough time and resources. Personally I would prefer to have to option to modify the code in house if there is a business case to support it without having to incur the expense of reverse engineering the code and risking potential litigation over intellectual property writes by doing so. I can only hope that PLM vendors will be enlightened enough to provide open source solutions and permit the user communities to contribute to the PLM solutions available.

Lev, Thank you for your insight on this “open” topic. I found “open” is not simple to define and implement. I think, there are specific characteristics of “openness”, and they are depending on a domain you are located. The current situation in CAD/PLM industry is different from other software domains. On the bottom is always value/cost comparison. Open strategies can significantly change it and, as a result, to change trends in the development of open PLM solutions. One of the questions who will start this change and who will survive in the end… Best, Oleg

I am well aware of the challenges of the CAD/PLM industry. I’ve been working in the field for twenty two years. In my experience, PLM has always been a tool that needs to be tailored to meet the needs of the company implementing it. I have never seen PLM used out of the box without some tailoring. API’s help tailor the low hanging fruit of workflows, reports and minor changes to web API’s. Often the API is not enough. Changes are needed that go beyond the scope of the API. This is where open source code would be a useful tool.

Some of the concerns associated with tailoring a software solution are maintaining the changes when upgrading to a new release of the core system, support and maintenance of a non-standard implementation, and the cost of implementing changes to the out-of-the-box system. These costs must be weighed against the value of changes. Sometimes the value of the changes are difficult to quantify. Things like user acceptance are hard to assign a dollar value to.

I apologize for the grammar errors in my previous post. I need an editor for my comments. I was trying to dash off my thoughts in a hurry. Hopefully you all got the gist of what I was trying to say despite my typos.