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
