Earlier this week, Kenesto – new outfit of Mike Payne announced about general availability of their cloud based business process automation services. If you missed the announcement, navigate your browser to the following link. I blogged about Kenesto before – PLM, Kenesto and Process experience. Released version brings some additional features such as a cloud viewer from TechSoft3D, enhanced reporting and few more. According to Mike Payne:
We have built a product which works the way people want it to without forcing them to change how they work and which delivers technology in precisely the way people want to access it. With Kenesto 2012 we have reached an objective no PLM system has achieved before: practically zero implementation costs for deployment or training.
Autodesk PLM360 vs. Kenesto. Data management is a difference.
Randal Newton of GraphicSpeak coined an interesting term – unPLM. Navigate to the article to read more. Randal is driving some parallels between Autodesk PLM 360 and Kenesto. He is speaking about the amount of processes / solutions as one of the differences, but not only. Here is an interesting passage from the article:
The first product that comes to mind when looking at Kenesto is Autodesk 360 PLM, the cloud-based product lifecycle management system introduced earlier this year. Look past the cloud deployment, the openness about pricing, and the browser-based work environment and there are many differences. Autodesk 360 is aimed at the traditional PLM market, engineering departments; Kenesto is looking at wider deployment in the enterprise.
The comparison between “traditional PLM market, engineering department” and “wider enterprise deployment” is something that caught my attention. I navigated to the previous GraphicSpeak article – Autodesk launches cloud-based PLM. Here is a quote with examples of PLM 360 apps:
Autodesk says 360 is made up of more than 140 apps so far, which can either be used as-is or modified by users. The apps so far fall into ten categories: Quality, Supplier Management, Engineering, Program Management, Service and Support, Operations, Sales and Marketing, Manufacturing, Executives, IT professionals.
It looks like PLM 360 is clearly focused on how to cover all organizational activity and not stopping on the level of PLM for engineering department. When Kenesto is focusing on business automation, PLM 360 provides much more by allowing to manage data and processes beyond engineering. In my view, flexible and adaptable process managament is probably a differentitation. Kenesto can provide it on top of Autodesk PM 360 in order to serve broader set of end users in organization focusing on processes rather than on data management. For the moment, PLM 360 cannot support such a level of flexibility, and it creates an opportunity Kenesto can use. The right question to ask – for how long?
What is my conclusion? Process automation is an important function of many systems and applications. It can be part of PLM, CRM, ERP and other solutions. From that standpoint, Kenesto can potentially serve a much broader audience. However, PLM 360 is managing data. Kenesto is not doing so (at least, for the moment). So, Kenesto can come to the play when data-management problems already solved (or less important). Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
