PTC Named the Technology Leader, but what can we learn from the ranking?

Last year, I wrote about Why traditional PLM ranking is dead. The article raised a wave of discussion and debates about how to compare PLM solutions – a comprehensive set of tools and technologies coming from giant software vendors.

One year later, my attention was caught by another ranking article from Quadrant Knowledge Solutions. In the evaluation, entitled “Market Outlook: Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), 2018-2023, Worldwide,” PTC was recognized in the Quadrant SPARX Matrix for demonstrating excellence in technological capabilities and customer impact.

Check this article Market Outlook:Product Lifecycle Management(PLM), 2018-2023, Worldwide. The report and research materials can be found here. There is very small number of vendors in the report – top 4 CAD vendors, Oracle, SAP and IFS. Number of emerging vendors are missing. Check the report and draw your conclusion. There few interesting bits and bytes of information about PLM business in this report – so, take you time to read it.

My favorite chart is this one. Revenue split between on premise, SaaS and professional services. While dominant position of on premise software is not surprising, the proportion of services compared to licenses is interesting and, in my view, different from usually presented split between licenses and services.

Another good piece of information is definition of what is included in PLM business:

Unfortunately, article doesn’t give much data about comparison of vendors. It explains methodology, but didn’t show up final numbersha (unless I missed them).

What is my conclusion? I found report is a good source of information about PLM market, but not much relevant in terms of how manufacturing company can decide what product has a better fit their needs. Which brings back again a question about PLM benchmarking and ranking. In the world of 7 gigantic vendors, industry needs to figure out a better way to recommend what solution is a better fit to a specific engineering and manufacturing challenges. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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