CONTACT Software Open World – IoT and Cloud

I’m in Germany attending CONTACT Software Open World. My “State of PLM” keynote is tomorrow. However, I had a chance to attend the first day of the event and wanted to share some news and thoughts. I captured few slides from the presentation of CONTACT Software (CS) founder and CEO Mr. Karl-Heinz Zachries.

Almost traditional these days the notion of growing product complexity was presented by introducing a transformation of a simple mechanical car mirror to a modern mirror with sensors, display, data collection and other capabilities.

The big news in a new CONTACT Software platform release was an introduction of IoT offering based on CS IoT Methods. Together with more traditional PLM capabilities, IoT methods and open source components is a new vision behind CS platform.

The following slide gives you a more granular breakdown of new CS platform features.

Multi-cloud approach was another news introduced by CS. On the picture below, you can see some marketing architecture explaining boundaries of CS Cloud. Note a combination of PLM and IoT methods.

The event took place in a magnificent palace – MARITIM Hotel am Schlossgarten Fulda.

What is my conclusion? IoT is big change in everything and it will influence enterprise IT landscape. PLM is on the collision course with IoT and you can see how PLM vendors are getting more prepared to that event. Still, I can see many unknowns… But vendors are re-positioning and looking how to offer customer PLM value for IoT. Here is the thing- data is a biggest value that PLM vendors can bring to a common PLM-IoT table. But the problem is that most of PLM business models are reluctantly focused on locking data and making it very hard and sometimes even impossible to get the data out. For IoT driven systems, the ability to get data out and mix it with other data sources is crucial.  The the data can be used for intelligence and decision making. PLM practice to hold product data can be a very disturbing. The ability of PLM vendors to unlock data to consumer will define vendors’ future success in PLM-IoT strategies and IT business. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of openBoM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups and supply chain. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.