I want to continue the theme of disruption started in my post last week. I can see two major forces that will disrupt traditional PLM approach nowadays – cloud and open source. Both have some strong position points and some weaknesses. I put some of my thoughts about cloud and open source disruption last year – PLM cloud and open source disruptive trajectories. I want to get back to this topic. I was reading TechCrunch article- Oracle Is Bleeding At The Hands Of Database Rivals. Read the article. It clearly influenced by recent Oracle financial results announcement. Nevertheless, I found some facts and opinions there very important and interesting. Here is my favorite passage:
Until this past week, the extent of Oracle’s problems were not known. But there is a cut, a slight bleeding that’s now visible. But how deep is the cut? How much is Oracle really bleeding? That’s exactly the question analysts asked in a Reuters story after the earnings results: “Data base revenue, which has been the cash machine of the company, has changed. There are now alternative databases, as well as the cloud,” said Mark Moerdler, an analyst at Bernstein Research. “That pressure is still a tiny bleed, but it is out there and the question is – is it bigger than we think it is?”
Another interesting case built around solutions and databases built on top of open source. One of them mentioned in the article is Datastax – outfit providing solutions based on open source database Casandra. Here is the quote:
Oracle reported this week that new software licenses are down two percent. And that decline is in part reflected by the adoption of NoSQL databases offered by Datastax and a variety of other services that use in-memory technology at the database layer. The reason for the drop has more to do with the enterprise acceptance of online applications more than anything else, said Datatastax CEO Billy Bosworth in an interview last week. That’s the truth. NEA Ventures Scott Sandell said to me at SXSW that CIOs are convinced to move their workloads but cloud security is still an issue. That’s where companies like Datastax enter the picture. Datastax is built on Cassandra, a high performance Apache open-source database technology with security at its core.
TechCrunch’s article made me think about influence of open source and cloud solutions in PLM market and the potential to provide solution alternatives to customers looking how to get a different PLM implementations. I can see many customers are moving to the cloud. A particular segment of customers might be interesting to find an alternative, but still struggle with the justification of their security procedures can be changed to adopt open source solutions that can provide them alternative licensing models and optimized cost. However, the most interesting is a combination of both approaches. Even if open source and cloud might sounds as orthogonal approach, business combination can be interesting.
What is my conclusion? It is an interesting time in enterprise and PLM market specifically these days. Changes are coming from all directions. Technological disruption and new business models are coming across interests of customers to find alternatives to existing PLM solutions. The primary focus of customers is flexible solution, fast ROI and reliable solution framework for the future. The coopetition of cloud and open source can play an interesting role and become a game changing factor. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
