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
10 November, 2017

Earlier this year, I learned from CIMdata that cloud PLM is not doing very well. CIMdata announced collaborative research sponsored...

1 December, 2009

The following NYT article drove my attention yesterday – Open Source as a Model for Business is Elusive. I already...

5 June, 2015

I have an unusual post for this weekend. It is related to big data stories on my blog. Big Data...

24 March, 2021

Hexagon’s Article The Digital Thread Comes to BIM brings an interesting perspective on the industrial development of construction projects and...

25 June, 2010

When you talk to a sales person from one of the PLM companies, you for sure will be exposed to...

18 February, 2016

  PLM is complex – the paradigm, definition, implementation, technology. Simplification of PLM is the discussion topic among PLM industry...

28 July, 2009

My short conclusion after very productive discussion about how to move PLM to mainstream. First of all, I enjoyed it...

5 August, 2009

Interesting (and a little long) review of various options to store data on a cloud from Dr. Dobbs – Database...

25 May, 2010

A short note on WorldCAD Access by Ralf Grabowski got my attention few days ago. In a very competitive world...

Blogroll

To the top