Can “Try For Free” Model Work in PLM?

Can “Try For Free” Model Work in PLM?

In my view, “Free” is continuing to pull people. Recently, I’ve seen few articles in PLM Blogosphere that was talking about “free” PLM offerings. You can point on a very good article by Zero-wait State – PLM Perspective: Free PLM Software Tomorrow. Jos Voskuil wrote – Free PLM Software Doesn’t Help Companies! Time ago, I posted my PLM Prompt: Is Free the Future of PLM?

Preparing to my roundtable discussions during this week Technia PLM Innovation Forum and next week isicad 2010 / COFES-Russia, I researched is there something new on the horizon of “Free” and PLM. So I came to an interesting announcement of PLM Plus about their Try For Free offering. You can see it by navigating your browser on the following link.

What is my take? I can see a very small number of companies are innovating now in PLM space. I can literally find a few. I can see PLM Plus is one of them. I haven’t heard from them a very long period of time since PLMPLus Dawns the Ref Gloves of Simplified Internet-based, On Demand PLM. I can see different pros and cons about “Try for free” model. Pros – you don’t need to invent up-front money to buy licenses, you can decide to give up if it doesn’t fit your organization.  Cons – the organization needs to invest time and resources to work with “free trial”.

No conclusion for today. I subscribed to my “free trial” of PLM Plus. Let see how it works…

Best, Oleg

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  • Broepke

    There has to be ways that this will work over time but thing that makes me question if customers will use this model is the issue you get with data loading. They all want to see their data in the system, en masse, however cleaning it up, prepping it for import and simply picking a project at the right point in time to get started with (not to mention mfg companies really struggle importing just a single project vs. their entire organization’s data) will be a challenge. The thought of enterprise software really going cloud will fix the upgrade / deploy / maintenance and hardware issues, but unless some magic happens it will never replace the data loading or the process consultation needed to figure out how a new system fits with their old… (oh yeah… then there’s enterprise integration next)… I’m exhausted just thinking about it.

  • beyondplm

    Brian, thank you for the comment! You are absolutely right – all customers will be interested to see “THEIR DATA” in the system to evaluate it. This is a place where PDM/PLM software isn’t providing a good solution. Loading existing legacy data is a huge problem, in my view and lead to a significant barrier in mainstream adoption of various PDM / PLM solutions. I had a chance to write about this before – http://beyondplm.com/2010/07/26/plm-and-legacy-data/.
    Btw, why / how do you think cloud will solve this problem? We have a problem on a premise, tomorrow the same problem will move to cloud… right?
    Best, Oleg

  • Vladislav Skoupski

    I think no. Every plm software is out-of-the-box solution and every plm-software needs some customizations to enterprise. I think that pilot project is much better than “try-for-free”.

  • beyondplm

    Vladislav, thanks for this comment! I see your point – without pilot project it is hard to understand and see a value. However, it can be “a free pilot project” in this case… Does it make sense? Best, Oleg

  • Vladislav Skoupski

    Yes. Pilot project must be free.

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