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

Enterprise App Store: There is an App… for what?

Enterprise App Store: There is an App… for what?
Oleg
Oleg
11 September, 2012 | 2 min for reading

I’m sure you are familiar with a famous Apple slogan – there is an app for that. We are in love of our apps and use them a lot. The idea of Apps was picked up by enterprise software developers as well and popularized. I believe the idea is good. In one of my posts last year, I discussed this topic – PLM Enterprise App Store: Bad Idea or Future Promise? Since last year, I’ve seen how the idea of enterprise app store was adopted by marketing enterprise software companies in ERP, CRM and some other ideas. Autodesk popularized this approach in recently released PLM 360 cloud product.

I’m still learning this topic. Few days ago, my attention was caught by the following article – 400,000 apps in the App Store have never been downloaded says report. The statistic is really amazing – 60% of apps never been downloaded even one time.

Let’s leave the problem of app store and consumer app developers aside and think about enterprise app store. The problem of App usage made me think about past PDM toolkits. If you spent enough time if PDM/PLM industry, you probably remember the era of PDM toolkits. It allowed to developers and service companies to assembly and configure a specific PDM system for any needs. Sounds like a good idea? However, we know that PDM toolkits ended up with high level of implementation complexity, cost and migration issues. You had too many feature, functions, bolts, nuts…  I think, enterprise apps can introduce a new problem – how a person in organization can have a right set of apps? Which can be translated into two things – focus on right applications and balance the level of granularity.

What is my conclusion? I think, we are all excited about consumerization and the promise to project a success of mobile devices and web to enterprise software and PLM. Even so, we need to be aware about potential drawbacks. I want to quote Albert Einstein – Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
4 January, 2019

Holiday Season is over and New Year is here. As we move forward we look at 2019 and what challenges...

28 May, 2010

I had chance to read a very interesting blog by Fracois Guillaumin related to SOA and PLM. He writes about roots...

16 August, 2024

For many years, CAD/PLM – ERP integration was a topic that triggered many questions. As you probably note, I put...

21 July, 2009

Loud prompt – Microsoft is releasing Office 2010 version, which will include free Office 2010 browser version. Take a look...

7 July, 2010

I’ve been thinking more about what are the gaps in taking PLM to the next level of collaboration. Social trend...

15 May, 2012

I hope I’ve got your attention with this blog title. So far, GrabCAD was known, until now, as a company...

6 August, 2010

I had a chance to read “Sent from my iPad”  on VEKTORRM last week. Dave Angelotti discussed an option to...

16 June, 2016

I’m attending Autodesk Forge DevCon these days in San Francisco. This is first ever pure Development Conference. Autodesk is making...

6 May, 2015

Yesterday, I had a privilege to share my thoughts about Bill of Materials and BOM management during my keynote at...

Blogroll

To the top