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

SaaS and Open Source: PLM Future Rides

SaaS and Open Source: PLM Future Rides
olegshilovitsky
olegshilovitsky
17 November, 2009 | 2 min for reading

Recent announcements about new company PLM+ stroke me to think again about these two interesting trends – On Demand (or SaaS if you will) and Open Source Software (OSS). In one of my previous posts, I talked about promising future trends for PLM. In my view, both (On Demand and OSS) are there.

On Demand
On the positive side of this model, I can figure out the following: no releases and upgrade milestones (at least an option to do so), no need for IT/Servers, completely web oriented, available everywhere, potentially much more mobile friendly. On the negative side of this model bold are security concerns, integration with organizational enterprise systems zoo and potential performance. The long future of on demand looks to me much brighter in comparison to today’s reality. Ability to deliver focused application using this model will be a key to success. Full blown PLM deployment with tight enterprise system integrations seems like not an option for 2010. PLM On Demand option was discovered by Arena and Agile (in the past). Both didn’t make it big enough yet to become mainstream option.

Open Source Software
OSS is a very interesting option for PLM. Huge customization and flexibility potential, services and partners involvement, business model benefits – all these factors are bold advantages for PLM. However, it is not clear if PLM community is big and mature enough to generate enough service business for PLM vendors today.

So, what is my conclusion today? On Demand option looks like favorable to those customers who are interested to get predefined functionality out-of-the-box. Do you think such set of functionality can be defined today similar to what happened to CRM? This is not clear. I want to quote Jos Voskuil blog saying “ERP systems came on the market 15 years before PLM, how many ERP on demand solutions do exist“. OSS is a very interesting opportunity to generate service money for PLM community. However, customer volume is the requirement to make this option viable.

I’m looking with great interest for both Arena and Aras experiments with On Demand and OSS. In my view, the potential change in this space can come either by newcomers with a new and interesting solution as well as by existing big vendors stepping into this space.

Just my thoughts. YMMV.

Best, Oleg.

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
26 May, 2016

Cloud is one of the top trending topics in PLM space. After initial resistance, all PLM vendors are currently supporting...

5 November, 2023

In the world of manufacturing, product development, product data management, supply chain management, project management and engineering software, one topic...

14 October, 2016

Engineering.com webinar with fascinating name – Not your father’s PLM by Chad Jackson of Lifecycle Insight reminded me the textbook example...

12 June, 2015

PI Congress is coming to Boston this year. The program just became available online and you can see it here....

16 January, 2013

Last week I started the discussion about about modern BOM challenges. That discussion made me think more about the idea...

23 February, 2014

Amazon Web Services is one of the most popular cloud platform these days. We can say that Amazon became de-facto...

17 February, 2019

Solidworks PDM was always a very interesting place to spot. Two decades ago, Solidworks didn’t focus much on PDM. Partnership...

9 January, 2020

Companies and businesses need to grow. If they don’t, businesses will die and investors won’t get their money back. According...

30 January, 2012

Cloud is hyping in 2012. Coming Facebook IPO can only supercharge the future of cloud computing. Last year Autodesk announcement...

Blogroll

To the top