My January was busy with travels. If you followed my blog and twitter over the past month, you’ve seen my posts and twitter messages from PLM Innovation 2011 event in London and SolidWorks World 2011 in San Antonio, TX. One of the most interesting trends that I’m observing last time is “consumerization” of enterprise software. It comes in different aspects. The most notable is re-thinking of the way enterprise applications, in general, and specifically Product Lifecycle Management is going. My hunch- people are ready to make compromises in functionality in order to have more usable software helping them in everyday life. iPad is actually a very good example. Despite the fact of providing fewer functionalities and, in general, being limited on the internet, iPad developed a huge adoption spiral. Apple sold 7.5 M iPads during the last quarter. Why it is so? I think, people are tired of complexity related to operation of complex PCs. The simplicity of iPad operation is the winning factor. Guess what? The same is going to happen with enterprise and engineering software. Now, let me come to my January top 5.
SolidWorks n!Fuze: The Cloud Remake of PLM Collaboration?
The collaboration topic in PLM is still a place where we will see lots of innovations. The attempt to remake some old concepts to a new reality is a good sign in my view. I can see “cloud” concepts, focus on usability and introducing of social elements as right steps toward converting n!Fuze into something useful. However, I have to note that some functionality of n!Fuze will create an overlap with existing Enterprise PDM features. Users have a tendency to push the limits of product can do from the functional standpoint, and I can see people can use n!Fuze as a basic PDM on the cloud.
PLM Innovation 2011: PLM and Engineering Software Trends
During my presentation on PLM Innovation Congress in London, I talked about major trends in Enterprise, Technologies and PLM customer’s demands. Navigate your browser to the following link to see my presentation. The major enterprise trends – mobility, social, open source and end of Microsoft dominance. From the technological standpoint, I noted significant impact of consumer and web 2.0 on engineering and manufacturing software. Another two technological impacts are coming from cloud computing and something I identified as “data networks” that going to replace the dominance of databases.
CAD, PLM and End of Microsoft Dominance
The development of multi-platform application is a tough work that requires additional resources of vendors. However, time is about to change and vendors are responding to the reality of the software and hardware platforms. I think, we are going to see growing appearance of CAD and PLM software on non-Microsoft platforms soon. I will be a very interesting change, in my view.
SolidWorks Lifecycle Management
In this post, I’m talking about changes in Dassault SolidWorks management and future perspective of SolidWorks product and technologies. I definitely can see a new chapter in what SolidWorks need to accomplish in coming years. The potential fundamental changes coming from multiple directions – platform, geometry, PDM. I tend to agree with SolidSmack’s Josh interviewing new SolidWorks CEO Bertrand Sicot – remember the roots is important.
3D/PLM and iPad: Future or Baloney?
You can find my collection of iPad applications related to 3D, CAD and PLM in this post. iPad and “new tablets” are creating a new device niche. New iPad apps provide us capabilities and user experience we have never seen before. It will take few more years until iPad gold rush will be transformed into valuable business apps, but I definitely can see some of them becomes a reality in Engineering and Manufacturing world.
Best, Oleg
