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

Open Source: Is the Game Changing for PLM?

Open Source: Is the Game Changing for PLM?
olegshilovitsky
olegshilovitsky
11 March, 2009 | 2 min for reading

In my view, open source (or more precisely –open source software) is becoming more and more visible in the business of enterprise software. 

There is an important characteristic of PLM related to business that we need to keep in mind in order to analyze the impact of open source on PLM. There is a high segmentation of customer requirements for different industries and customers needs for different types of customers. Today’s “mindset PLM leaders” still are not capable of covering the full scope of customers’ needs. This topic makes open source both attractive and disruptive for PLM.

 On one hand, when there are many common customer requirements, open source is very beneficial.  Users have an ability to submit code from all participants of open source, for example, as in a Linux system. This scale up is very significant and allows us to develop big systems according to communities of users. But, at the same time, if there are quite many different requirements this can disadvantage of open source. 

In addition, due to the high percentage of services and customization, the ability to deliver overall PLM project as services without licenses cost is a significant advantage and changes the game of PLM system implementation. So for this type of customers, open source will probably be beneficial. At the same time, smaller customers will be more interested in standardized functionality with fixed cost that will allow them to achieve their ROI goals and less interesting when implementation turns to services projects. 

My conclusion – on one hand, open source in general and open source PLM specifically brings a significant improvement in the way we create systems for our customers. These models shift the initial discussion from license selling to customer requirements. On the other hand, it’s not clear how IP protection in different organizations will allow the crowdsourcing of open sources and common delivery in this field. This happened successfully with different non-PLM software, so it’s definitely a place we need to watch in the future.

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
16 May, 2018

One of the trending technologies these days is blockchain. Unless you live under the rock for the last few years,...

20 August, 2020

There is a new cool buzzword in the PLM universe called “low code”. If you didn’t hear about it yet,...

31 December, 2011

Time is running fast, and 2011 is behind us. It is a moment to take a look in the past,...

19 June, 2009

I’m going back to talking about the CAD interoperability story, inspired by some interesting experience with Google Apps and Microsoft...

12 October, 2009

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

18 May, 2021

My long time PLM buddy Jos Voskuil wrote about The Future PLM. In the voice of many PLM publications, Jos’...

24 November, 2015

Mobile devices have changed the way we live for the last 5 years. A decade ago, I was perfectly satisfied...

15 August, 2012

Social is a magic word many people use nowadays. After social networks “grand-success”, many people in PLM industry are thinking...

21 June, 2019

Many years ago, I’ve heard a very serious marketing joke. How to create enterprise software? It is easy – just...

Blogroll

To the top