From time to time, I’m experimenting with Google Trends. These results, obviously, cannot be counted as a serious research. At the same time, they can provide some insight on what happens. This morning, I was playing around “cloud” and “database” terms. I wonder if possible to find any evidence of changes in the balance between these two trends from the marketing standpoint. So, you can take a look on results:
Looking on the picture above, you can see the trend is clear. However, in order to neutralize the influence of “ash clouds” :), I also made a comparison between “database software” and “cloud software”.
PLM Marketing
CAD/PLM companies demonstrated a significant amount of focus introducing cloud oriented solutions. Earlier, I was talking about Autodesk and Dassault investments into cloud solutions. However, I found some interesting thing about Arena Solutions too. Arena is definitely not a newcomer if we speak about what we call cloud. Arena roots are going back into dot.com era 1990s when the company was started as bom.com. I tracked some funny marketing transformations that happened to Arena very recently.
Take a look on former definition of what Arena is doing (I took it from the old press release almost 4 years ago).
Arena Solutions is the leading provider of on–demand (SaaS) product lifecycle management solutions for manufacturing companies of all sizes. As the only true on–demand, secure Internet–based PLM service, Arena PLM provides a superior alternative to complicated, lengthy and expensive traditional PLM software deployments.
Fast forward into 2011. Pay attention on how Arena Solution presented now – Bill of Material (BOM) and change management solution in the cloud. It is also interesting to see a fresh look and feel of Arena solution website saying: Put your product data where it belongs. In the cloud. Interesting marketing transformation. Kind of “back to roots”.
What is my conclusion? I think, changes are really happen now. Even less than a year ago, people exposed lots of fear when talking about business solutions in the cloud. Not any more. I can see strong trends among the companies trying to evaluate possible advantages of cloud technologies. At the same time, when lots of things happen around in consumer technologies, marketing hype around the cloud becomes very strong, so enterprise software companies are trying to catch the wave. Just my thoughts..
Best, Oleg
