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

Will PLM Get Troubled by Future FOSS databases?

Will PLM Get Troubled by Future FOSS databases?
olegshilovitsky
olegshilovitsky
17 December, 2009 | 1 min for reading

The following article in TechWords “The New FOSS Frontier: The Database Market” drove me to think about PLM and RDBS relationships from a different angle. For PLM, as for all enterprise applications these days, RDBMS is almost commodity. PLM supports all of them (actually there are not so many – Oracle, MS SQL Server and DB2, who else?), cost of RDBS solution is insignificant since it either included into premium cost of PLM or RDBMS is already available in the organization.

Nevertheless, I think, things may go wrong. I see two aspects where PLM providers can be impacted. Here is my view on this.

1. Cost of PLM software. Introduction of FOSS into the enterprise domain can drive customers to think about the future cost cutting in software. With today’s huge payments for RDBMS, enterprises don’t see any other alternatives and continue to pay to ERP, PLM and other vendors. Tomorrow their expectation will be different.

2. Reliance on RDBMS vendor status quo. PLM systems are heavily relying on databases in general. Also, some of PLM systems are tuned for a specific RDBMS features. What will happen if PLM will lose RDBM anchor in enterprise?

So, what is my thoughts and conclusion today? Ringing bell of free should awake some of the sleeping PLM behemoths. Tomorrow the situation be a different and customer’s perception on enterprise software can change, just if a small fraction of enterprises, will be switching from licensed RDBMS systems to FOSS rivals. So, PLM better to come prepared.

Just my thoughts.
Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
28 June, 2013

App Store. These two words changed our life for the last few years. You have a problem? We have an...

23 June, 2010

I had chance to have a talk with David Siegel, entrepreneur, speaker and the author of a new book “Pull“....

9 April, 2009

I’m sure you will agree that one of the definite goals of PLM is to organize product related information. Finally,...

19 November, 2009

Microsoft finally made available beta versions of Office 2010 and SharePoint 1010 yesterday. So, I finally have an account to...

5 March, 2010

I had the chance to read Jim Brown’s post about SAP achievements in PLM. As usual, when PLM and ERP...

20 April, 2016

Innovation is trending these days. Companies are considering innovation as a single most powerful competitive advantage. Industry researchers and software...

3 December, 2015

Collaboration is such as sweet word. Remember, collaborative design, collaborative PDM, collaborative PLM, collaborative engineering, etc. Nice buzzwords, but what...

27 October, 2018

Data was always in the center of any PDM and PLM applications. The ability of PLM system to manage complex...

26 May, 2017

PLM industry is transforming. We can hear sounds of transformation everywhere. Data management is getting better – we are capable...

Blogroll

To the top