A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

PLM Jungle or PLM State?

PLM Jungle or PLM State?
Oleg
Oleg
7 October, 2010 | 2 min for reading

I read a blog post by Stephen Porter of Zero Wait State called – The PLM State: Why can’t we all just get along?. I think Stephen raised an important question of vendors co-existence in the engineering software ecosystem. It made me think about PLM Software Landscape and trends going around.

PLM and Enterprise Software Trends

In my view, there are few important things that happen today in PLM and engineering software world. I’d like to name few of them – vertical integration, increased speed of change and influence of consumer software. Vertical integration becomes more and more important in PLM. Customers are not interested to spend time integrating products. Customer demanded to have things integrated and work together from the beginning. It raises many questions about how vendors will maintain integrations. Speed of change represents growing dynamics of businesses. Engineering and PLM software will need to adjust their clocks with businesses. 12 months changes processes seems to be as something that business will stop accepting very soon. The cost of change becomes even more important. It raises a lot of questions related to traditional software release frames and speed of updates. Influence of consumer software becomes crucial. I think, we love all new applications and devices that came to use for the last 5-7 years. You can see a clear difference between “weekend life” and “business week” life. I can see a clear demand of customers to adopt “consumer behaviors” in the enterprise.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

This is another very important aspect to mention. During the last 10-15 years, PLM and other enterprise software companies tried to apply best practices and other strategies related to software product unification. My conclusion after these years is simple – one size doesn’t fit all. The need for diversification becomes more and more clear. Solutions are moving towards customization and differentiations of users in the organization. It will imply a growing amount of multi-vendor software use by customers.

Focus on Customers

Last, but definitely not least. The relationships between customer and vendors are moving in a very interesting direction. It reflects the overall software trends towards openness and customer excellence. The growing amount of Open Source, SaaS and other new business models will decrease customer’s lock-in on a specific software. It reflected in what customers will be looking for in the future PLM and Engineering Software.

What is my conclusion? I think, changes are coming to PLM Jungle from the outside world. Current models will not survive. The wave towards more dynamic business, openness, and customer un-locking is too strong to ignore.

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
31 July, 2014

Do you remember “throw over the wall of manufacturing” statement? This is a traditional engineering world. Pretty much sequential. Engineers...

24 June, 2009

I watched many videos and demos related to Microsoft Bing during the last few weeks. Actually, I liked the idea...

12 October, 2009

Reading again some books from 1992. Engineering and Manufacturing Data structures and Engineering Information Management Systems. I’d like to share...

28 July, 2017

After 120 years since Henry Ford built his first experimental car in a workshop behind his home in Detroit, we...

1 April, 2020

The original article was published on my Beyond PLM blog The coronavirus is a health crisis we never have seen before in...

14 January, 2016

I think, most of PLM people are considering the fight about pros and cons of intelligent numbers is only related to...

10 June, 2020

Yesterday, I attended the first-ever LiverWorx event delivered fully digitally online. The recent pandemic situation made many companies to switch...

17 July, 2020

PDM is one of the topics I’m following for many years. CAD files created tons of challenges and to develop...

3 March, 2018

Integration is a big deal during PLM implementation. I cannot recall any PLM implementation that went live without some sort...

Blogroll

To the top