PLM, Autodesk and Cloud Wars Club?

Companies are looking for differentiation in the way they are making business. PLM companies are not different. Dassault, PTC, Siemens PLM, Aras, etc. Nobody wants to sell “me too” cocktail nowadays. With the last Autodesk PLM announcement, it became clear that Autodesk is targeting a “cloud PLM” place. During the recent AU 2011 conference in Las Vegas, Carl Bass, Autodesk CEO, made it very clear that Autodesk wants to accomplish the following triad – Cloud ERP, Cloud CRM, Cloud PLM.

I was reading Michael Fauscette blog article – The Cloud Wars -2012. I found it interesting. Take a moment of time during the next week holiday slowdown and have a read. Make your conclusion. The names of companies on the list were quite predictable – Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Workday, Facebook. I especially liked the part related to salesforce.com in the list. Salesforce clearly having an ambition to come with strong enterprise solution and growing in multiple directions via acquisitions and partnership. Few months ago, during the Dreamforce 2011 event, I came across an interesting presentation made by Kennady – manufacturing solution built purely on top of Salesforce.com platform.

The cloud wars -2012 article and Autodesk cloud ambitions made me think about some potential in dynamics between Autodesk PLM platform and other “big cloud” players. Autodesk didn’t announce about what technology is running behind Nexus PLM. Amazon was mentioned, but it doesn’t mean anything about Autodesk cloud PLM platform. Another interesting Autodesk innovation is to integrate on premise Autodesk PDM (Vault) with future cloud solution – Autodesk Nexus.

What is my conclusion? Cloud competition becomes interesting in manufacturing. It is still far away from Google vs. Facebook clashes. However, who knows what we are going to see in 2-3 years from now? Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Tagged as: Autodesk, Cloud, Manufacturing, Salesforce.com