PLM Storm and Infinite Processes

I’m still off on vacation until Wednesday. However, as my PLM blogging buddy Jim Brown mentioned on the Facebook – “Blogging is my crack habit” :). I started to return to my blogging activities. My usual dispute with Jim was about PLM and Processes Management. So, I decided to come today with some notes related to PLM opportunity for a new process technology.

The ability to handle processes is extremely important for every organization. PLM vendors are strongly focusing on the development of data and process management platforms. And this is for a good reasons. However, what if PLM storm will come from outside? Have you had a chance to use Twitter service called backtweets? You can use it for free. Here is the result for my twitter profile.

Few weeks ago Tweeter acquired BackType. Read more about BackType and Twitter technological merge on Adweek site. BackType claims they are doing the same Hadoop do, but for processes. ITNews article Twitter to open source analytics platform states  – “Just like Hadoop, but for infinite processes“. Learn more about BackType by navigating on the following link.  If you haven’t had a chance to use BackType comment tracking, you can take a look on this following video to see how it works.

For those of you who want to feel more “geeky”, navigate to Twitter Engineering  blog – A Storm is coming: more details and plans for release. Here is a short list of use cases of what Storm supposed to provide.

1-Stream processing: Storm can be used to process a stream of new data and update databases in realtime. Unlike the standard approach of doing stream processing with a network of queues and workers, Storm is fault-tolerant and scalable.

2-Continuous computation: Storm can do a continuous query and stream the results to clients in realtime. An example is streaming trending topics on Twitter into browsers. The browsers will have a realtime view on what the trending topics are as they happen.

3-Distributed RPC: Storm can be used to parallelize an intense query on the fly. The idea is that your Storm topology is a distributed function that waits for invocation messages. When it receives an invocation, it computes the query and sends back the results. Examples of Distributed RPC are parallelizing search queries or doing set operations on large numbers of large sets.

What is my conclusion? I think, PLM can be disturbed by some technological innovation. It seems to me 10-15 years of “SQL business as usual” is a bit too much. I’m not counting 3D-related technologies. This is an obvious place where CAD vendors are trying to innovate. Rather than that – Storm is welcome! Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg