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

Open PLM – A Climb For Losers?

Open PLM – A Climb For Losers?
Oleg
Oleg
8 July, 2010 | 2 min for reading

Almost two months ago, I had chance to read a blog article by Mobile Beat with some intriguing name “Open is for losers” by Dave McClure. Take a look and form your opinion. Understanding the overall intention to provoke a good discussion around this topic, I decided to follow this blog post in some time to read discussion and see people’s opinion on this topic. It happened that independently some of PLM Think Tank posts generated some interesting discussion related to the topic of Openness.

Closed Thoughts About PLM Openness

Open vs. Closed PLM Debates

Today, I want to get back and discuss how I see the future of openness in PLM and Engineering Software.

Standards, Formats, Data Models

The discussion about standards and formats is life long. Do you think CAD and PLM industry will be able to generate a reasonable quality standard answering to the needs of industry? Discussions in this field are varying from request to develop independent formats and ends up by requests to disclosure existing data models, formats, etc. I don’t think these discussions may produce results in near future. The development of common formats and models is too expensive and, in the end, will require to have a set of tools to work with. The interesting potential will be to borrow some of the emerging web technologies.

APIs, Toolkits and Platforms

API is the most referenced way to make software open. Combined with a set of patterns, technologies and buzzwords, this is probably the way to do it in real life. The biggest remaining problem in this space is reliability and compliance of these APIs within the time. In addition, APIs and other internal mechanisms are under heavy licensing by vendors. I don’t see any silver bullet these days that can make any major improvements in this space.

Applications and Solutions

The reality of a current situation is that customers are working with multiple applications, products and solutions. In many situations, I can see no interest for a particular vendor to enable easy data migration from one tool to another. Therefore, we can see multiple software vendors or service providers that can help customers to solve this problem.

What is my conclusion today? How To Climb To Open PLM? This is the most important question that needs to be asked collectively in the industry. I think, the industry movement into PLM openness is the indicator of industry maturity. I can see ups and downs on this road. A critical mass of openness needs to be delivered by vendors to turn on the switch of benefits from open PLM. Multiple established vendors and newcomers will need to invest enough resources to make it happen. The remaining players will be able to deliver better solutions. Some of them can probably die on the road. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Share

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
8 March, 2016

I’m attending PI Congress event in Munich these days. There are lot of interesting information and presentation. If you follow...

18 February, 2011

In my view, Salesforce.com has been discovered a significant bias towards collaboration and collaborative software. Since last year Salesforce made...

29 December, 2020

This time of the year is a great opportunity to reflect on multiple topics. My article last week – PLM...

13 February, 2019

I spent last few days attending SOLIDWORKS World 2019 in Dallas, TX. My timeline was very intense with many meetings,...

19 July, 2010

The things are moving fast these days. One of the most fascinating trends is the emerging connection between physical and...

19 June, 2019

Many years ago, I’ve been following research papers of George J. Klir related to system approach in solving problems. My...

9 January, 2015

The discussion about the demand for PLM services yesterday made me think more about challenges in PLM deployments. Implementation is one...

7 October, 2013

Tagging is one of the most popular ways to classify information. Tagging became a mainstream way to classify information in...

18 March, 2012

If you following cloud news and especially what Salesforce.com is up to, you probably noticed this announcement – Saleforce.com is...

Blogroll

To the top