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

PLM Interest To Enterprise Search

PLM Interest To Enterprise Search
Oleg
Oleg
8 September, 2010 | 2 min for reading

I can see a growing interest of PLM providers to explore the story of enterprise search. This morning I’ve seen a mutual press release of Aras Corp. and NorthRidge Software. I liked this passage in the press-release:

PLM solutions encompass a wide range of complex data and files in a variety of formats, including CAD files, quality data, regulatory specifications, requirements, BOMs and more. With the NorthRidge Search Solution, Aras Innovator users can locate drawings, documents and other information by searching on keyword terms, phrases in the content or metadata values.

What is specially interesting in this information is that Aras is trying to follow their Open Source strategies and adopting Lucene and Solr a well known Open Source enterprise search solution and search libraries. If you want to learn more about Lucene you still can register to Lucene Revolution, which will happen in Boston in the beginning of October.

Just to remind you the previous events in PLM fast ride towards enterprise search technologies. Earlier this year, PTC confirmed their OEM relationships with Endecca. Almost In parallel to that, Dassault Systems spent 135M Euros to acquire Exalead – a provider of web and enterprise search solution.

So, what means this enterprise search gold rush for PLM companies. I can see 3 main reasons why PLM solution providers can be interested in making their search and enterprise search arsenals stronger.

PLM Systems Complexity

This is probably the top interest. At the time that PLM concepts getting acceptance in the enterprise, complexity of the tools and implementation becomes one of the most critical showstoppers preventing PLM software vendors from going mainstream in organizations. Search as a paradigm seems to be an option to resolve this complexity.

Enterprise Software Competition

The competition among software vendors is growing. Mindshare PLM providers face a strong competition from other enterprise software vendors such as providers of ERP, Supply Chain, Manufacturing Execution and other software. Each of these enterprise application classes represents a silo of information inside of organization. Enterprise search can be a technology to find information in multiple silos.

Influence of Consumer Software

This is last, but very important. I can see a significant influence on enterprise software in general and on PLM specifically from everything that exists in the consumer software space and on the internet. Search is hugely popular because of the success of Google. It provides a significant impact on decisions of PLM vendors to follow these streams.

What is my conclusion? Enterprise Software and PLM are struggling with a “complexity disease”. On the other side, enterprise search software is struggling with the need to provide additional differentiation to their “boring” search stories. It seems to me as a perfect match between them. What is your opinion?

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
24 June, 2013

The two terms “cloud computing” and “virtualization” have many things in common. From a specific technological standpoint, we can even...

24 July, 2022

SaaS is growing and I can see every day how manufacturing companies are adopting SaaS solutions. What was a vision...

17 February, 2016

Product data management (PDM) domain is transforming these days. Back a decade ago, PDM was a system that can introduce...

22 August, 2010

In the end of 1990s, CAD/PLM community was excited about development of Boeing 777 jet. The Boeing 777 is the first...

3 April, 2014

I’m coming again to this topic – User Interface. These days you can hear about it as user experience (UX)....

5 September, 2019

I’m following Autodesk Accelerate 2019 event taking place in Grand Rapids, MI this week. You can check it via Twitter...

4 December, 2009

My new post on 3D Perspectives: Best, Oleg

3 August, 2023

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is a transformative approach that, if implemented properly, can provide immense value to any engineering team...

10 October, 2013

Enterprise software business is complicated. It often comes with questions of system responsibilities and ownerships. IT usually holds primarily responsibility...

Blogroll

To the top