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

How To Disrupt PLM Price with Technologies?

How To Disrupt PLM Price with Technologies?
olegshilovitsky
olegshilovitsky
21 June, 2010 | 2 min for reading

My post “How To Manage ECO Without Paying $1’500 Per Seat” raised a very interesting discussion on Zero-Waite State blog about PLM price. Thanks Stephen Porter for doing that. I recommend you to get inside and have a read. This post made me think about the future of PLM price trajectories and an impact of technologies on the future of PLM price.

The Future Disruption

I hope you had chance to read the book by Chris Anderson – Free: The Future of a Radical Price. I’d call it the modern “Bible of Free”. One of the important points, in my view is the following – “information and technology cost is trending towards zero”. As part of this, my own believe is that we are going to experience an influence of this trend, including an influence of free-price-market in various fields. The potential weak elements in the chain of highly priced software products are those that have a serious customer dissatisfaction or a very high price/value characteristic. What happens with PLM? In my view, this is a definitely weak chain. The complexity, over-promising during a sale process and history of acquired products and companies created a place that needs to be disrupted. I can see potential PLM disruptors PLM disruptors – Open Source (Free Distribution) of Aras, few on-demand products and PTC SharePoint business. The last one is trying to ride SharePoint adoption and Microsoft strength in the enterprise market. Who will be more successful in the future PLM disruption? A very interesting question…

PLM Technology Weakness

Where I see a weakness in PLM technology we have today? The current technological approach was born 15-20 years ago. We are continuing to SQL our future. The development of most of PLM technological platforms are balancing to co-exist between existing customer commitments and future product development. Platform fundamentals are the same regardless on the type of user interface or modern marketing terms. This technology is vulnerable in front of new development that happened during past ten years in Web 2.0. To understand the scope of the last ten years and the potential influence is very important.

What is my conclusion? When Stephen is asking – The Price Is Right?, I’m thinking about sales lessons I learned in the past. The right price is one customer will be ready to pay. Since PLM sales these days are not similar to sales of iPhones and iPads, I think we have a problem. We won’t be able to solve it since the problem is not in the price, in my view. The problem is broader and related to all main components of PLM delivery to customer – price, technological complexity and high price customer need to pay by installing, customizing, modifying software and training people. To make PLM cheaper, to provide a more flexible PLM pricing model, or even give PLM away can definitely provide some pain-relief, but will not give a radical change to the industry.

Just my thoughts.
Best, Oleg

Share

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
5 June, 2021

Earlier this week, I had a chance to attend the PLM Market and Industry Forum organized by CIMdata. It was...

29 December, 2022

Manufacturers across the globe are continuing to push forward with transformational digital initiatives, recognizing the need to adapt their operations...

24 June, 2013

Cloud. Public. Private. Dedicated. Secured. Security topic can detonate and destabilize any discussion about cloud deployment. Tell people about security...

13 October, 2015

I’ve been following Amazon re:invent event last week. One of the largest Amazon events is totally focused on Amazon Web Services...

28 April, 2017

To speak about value of PLM is a tough job. I did it many time in my previous life –...

5 February, 2014

Do you know what means “hollow corporation”? My readers from UK and Europe should be familiar with the term. This...

12 August, 2010

Scaling up is a tough problem. I want to talk today and PLM Software scalability in unusual aspects – business...

14 July, 2024

In my previous article How to solve PLM & ERP, I explored the challenges and complexities involved in integrating PLM...

26 June, 2009

Short prompt. I want to continue  theme related to PLM adoption. There are many talks about PLM deployment, ROI, Values...

Blogroll

To the top