The demand for live connected collaboration

Our environment is getting more distributed then ever. The borders between work, home and mobile environments are blurring. What is the right answer to such a change? Software vendors are developing and acquiring new technologies and products to help them to manage data and communication in such environment. My attention was caught by the following news – Salesforce.com is buying Quip. If you never heard about it you catch up on what Quip can do for you here. Quip was developing live document processor – tools that allow to use to collaborate in a real time.

Launched in 2013, Quip’s cloud-based software let users create documents and work on them together. A column that appears next to documents shows all messages and comments made about it. The idea is to make it easier to edit and comment from a mobile phone or tablet.

The following picture can give you an idea how Quip did it.

It made me think about the trend in collaboration. The word “collaboration” used a lot in engineering world. However, the meaning of this word is very different. It can be an access to a bunch of static reports and it can be a modern cloud-based application allowing to user to get access to the same information and interact together.

For many years, Salesforce.com was one of the companies that pioneering cloud computing and SaaS software. Living documents is an interesting way to transform existing static data management paradigm into new cloud, online and mobile collaboration.

What is my conclusion? The demand for online communication is growing. Digital habits such as  online connected document and live collaboration are moving into business space. Engineering and manufacturing are intensively data-driven. PLM companies were  inspired by Salesforce vision for cloud and SaaS. Is it a time to think about new paradigms in data management and collaboration? Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of openBoM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups and supply chain. My opinion about BOM can be unintentionally biased.