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
16 December, 2009

I want to finish my ‘back to basics’ set of posts with the topic of PLM and ERP integration. Staying...

19 June, 2017

Are we going to see both PLM and ERP living in harmony integrated seamlessly?  Such a fascinating question posted by...

28 March, 2017

For the last few years PLM vendors made a big step towards acceptance of cloud technology, SaaS application and subscription...

20 September, 2016

The last decade of open source, mobile and web development taught us that to create software can be easy. Don’t...

25 June, 2022

Earlier this week, I attended Autodesk Forge Data Day in Boston. I could not miss the event with such a...

29 September, 2011

PLM is a lot of lifecycle. It is a very important characteristic of PLM to support product access the multiple...

14 September, 2012

File Sharing on the cloud. Who is not doing it these days? It sounds so simple and straightforward. Dropbox was...

28 August, 2017

If you follow Siemens PLM Solid Edge, you might noticed another turn in a history of data management (PDM) development....

7 June, 2020

In my What is PLM Circa 2020s article, I talk about how I see the future of PLM development. The...

Blogroll

To the top