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

The future of free PDM

The future of free PDM
Oleg
Oleg
11 February, 2015 | 3 min for reading

free-pdm-suff

Free is an interesting trend. As we always said, there is no free lunch. But, last decade introduced us to a new way of thinking about FREE. I recommend you to read a book – Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson. Free trend is interesting and has many opportunities. It is, of course, not a silver bullet to solve any problem. I can define two main use cases for free service or software: 1/ multi-level business schema in which monetizing is enabled by free product. The best example is Google. More generic use case is any ads selling in social networks; 2/ freemium model in which free product used to increase market share and product reach. Despite many discussions about significant potential of freemium models, it didn’t change the grand business schema in PDM/PLM. Most of “free” examples are coming into option #2 I mentioned above. PLM is a system that must be “sold” opposite to other products that can be “bought”. However, PDM is a bit different. Last 2-3 years indicated some shifts in PDM development. The value became more clear, the functionality is more standard and cloud file sharing and storage tools gave some vision for the future of PDM. In parallel, CAD/PDM integration became more integrated and customers are often assume that it must be provided by CAD vendors.

Today was a big day for customers looking for PDM solutions. First news came from SolidWorks World 2015. Here is the news – I picked it up from #SWW15 tweet feed – SOLIDWORKS 2016 package will include Standard PDM.

sw2016-free-pdm-1

Second news came from GrabCAD. A short email from GrabCAD this morning informed me that GrabCAD Workbench is now completely free. According to Hardi Meybaum, GrabCAD CEO here is why GrabCAD decided to make Workbench free.

…the reason is a focus on growing the community. “Our goal with this change is to reach more people. Returning to the free model of Workbench will increase the speed of adoption and support uninhibited product design collaboration.”

These two events made me think about future trajectories of PDM value proposition and pricing. Few interesting data points – if you are listening to companies developing cloud CAD solution, you can get the message – future cloud CAD won’t require PDM. More specifically, PDM will be a fundamental part of cloud CAD allowing people to collaborate on design. Even more, it will be much more transparent and intuitive than today. On the other side, generic cloud file sharing and collaboration tools are getting much more smarter and can quietly become ready to manage CAD files. Last, but not least – the complexity of CAD / PDM integration is well know fact. The trend towards simplification of integration and an attempt to re-imagine the way PDM can be integrated with PDM gain some support from both software vendors and customers. It might end up by removing check-in/out commands or tight bundling of CAD/PDM solutions coming from CAD vendors.

What is my conclusion? Everyone needs to manage CAD data, but nobody wants to implement CAD data management. My hunch, GrabCAD decided to give away Workbench to reach more customers and learn more future potential of GrabCAD business models. SolidWorks is trying to gain more market share from own customers without PDM solutions before they will implement free cloud PDM from other vendors.  SolidWorks customers will get standard PDM package for free, which is a good news for large amount of companies having 2-3 SolidWorks seats. It looks like we are in the beginning of PDM market disruption. I can be wrong, but users are winning and this is what mostly important. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
10 April, 2013

I’ve been attending North American PLM Market & Industry Forum organized by CIMdata earlier today. CIMdata is running these forums...

17 June, 2015

I’ve been following CIMdata PLM roadmap for HTE event on twitter yesterday. Navigate to the following link if you want to...

21 July, 2010

Data formats is an interesting topic in the context of engineering and manufacturing. Manufacturing company is relaying on a significant...

11 March, 2017

Almost 10 years ago, Gartner defined IT obsolescence management as major emerging issue. Here is a passage from old the old article...

11 April, 2018

Amazon will compete CAD and PLM vendors by expanding their in downstream value chain. Are you laughing? You might be...

14 April, 2019

My last article from NetSuite SuiteWorld 2019 in Las Vegas is about Oracle NetSuite Manufacturing vision. It was presented during...

31 March, 2014

The usage of cloud is growing every day. Started as an option to simplify collaboration and data exchange, it is...

9 September, 2011

During the past months, I’ve seen an increased amount of conversations about the future of App Store software model in...

27 September, 2017

Photo credit: Tesla Robot Dance by Steve Jurvetson It is hard to argue about value proposition behind “PLM projects”. PLM story...

Blogroll

To the top