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

How to create new digital business to replace existing CAD and PLM players

How to create new digital business to replace existing CAD and PLM players
Oleg
Oleg
15 October, 2017 | 3 min for reading

My favorite weekend reading was The scale of tech winners by Benedict Evans (). I recommend you to read and draw your conclusions. The article brings a very interesting perspective on old and new generation of tech companies – Wintel (Windows + Intel) and GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon). GAFA created a dominant force in digital world. But what is most interesting is the size of this new world.

To understand the scale take a look on the following chart:

Internet killed printed ads, but Facebook and Google eat digital space. This digital ecosystem created unprecedented opportunities – 3bn smart phones, connected devices, online communication. However, my favorite passage is about small competition in this space:

How do the mice do when there are four elephants fighting it out? As we saw with first GoPro and now perhaps Sonos, if you’re riding the smartphone supply chain cornucopia but can’t construct a story further up the stack, around cloud, software, ecosystem or network effects, you’re just another commodity widget maker. And the aggressive competition in advertising products from Google, Facebook and now to some extent Amazon has taken a lot of the oxygen away from anyone else.

Let me project the story to CAD and PLM space. CAD and PLM world is still living in its own IBM / Wintel age. The major companies in this spaces are around for the last 20-30 years. These companies are slowly evolving, but keeping their existing space.

In my view, the best part of GAFA story to learn is related to Amazon. This is a chart every CAD and PLM company should put in front of them if they want to win the next CAD/PLM platform war.

Amazon changed the scale game by digitalization of commerce, warehouses and deliveries. It is about place with a huge potential to scale – e-commerce and connected fields.

It made me think that to change the scale of the game in CAD, PLM and manufacturing planning, new platforms will have to go beyond a traditional playbook. We need to have more oxygen to burn existing players GAFA created a new digital world and made Wintel and IBM irrelevant in this space. They didn’t create a cheaper PC for that. New functions and new business models are needed.

What is my conclusion? Digital world created a lot of opportunities for new vendors. New CAD and PLM players must realize that new opportunities can be only possible in a new digital world – the place where existing CAD and PLM cannot play. An old function cannot be replaced by the same slightly optimized function. Internet, mobile communication, advertising and e-commerce demonstrated how new platforms can create a new world to scale. New digital CAD and PLM should find economical benefits to manufacturing companies in a new digital world. Then the change will happen and new platforms will win. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Want to learn more about PLM? Check out my new PLM Book website.

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.

 

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
11 November, 2012

Microsoft is releasing to manufacturing Office 2013 version. For many years, Office was a symbol of Microsoft’s desktop empire. Not...

15 August, 2014

Product Data Management (PDM) isn’t a new domain. The first PDM systems were invented 20-30 years ago with a simple...

30 June, 2010

I’d like to continue discussion of Openness and PLM (see my yesterday post – Closed Thoughts about PLM Openness) with...

19 August, 2013

The technology trends are interesting these days. You think what can be more disruptive than cloud. Indeed, cloud, social and...

3 December, 2017

Siemens PLM made some waves in PLM and IoT world last week by announcing availability of Siemens MindSphere platform for...

14 January, 2017

Product Innovation Platform is an interesting concept emerged for the last few years. It addresses few very important aspects of...

6 February, 2014

To implement PLM is a process and change. Speak to anyone in engineering and manufacturing community and they will bring...

12 February, 2010

Recent SolidWorks World Event brought a significant splash of discussion about cloud based applications. It is interesting to see different...

27 June, 2008

I’d like to share my view on V6 technologies Dassault Systems presented last week on our technological forum DevCon 2008. If...

Blogroll

To the top