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

What is PLM market growth potential?

What is PLM market growth potential?
Oleg
Oleg
21 August, 2019 | 3 min for reading

The understanding market potential can make all the difference for the company between sitting courtside in the middle of the most active and watching the game from home. If you working on market and strategy, you have to get a pulse of the market. Then make an assessment of impact, competitors and future growth potential.

I found an interesting slide (source Altium) demonstrate revenue growth and EBITDA for CAD/PLM vendors over the last 12 months period.

I will come back to the slide. However, according to CIMdata reports, PLM market seems to be hot and moving. CIMdata is one of the leading companies that can give you an idea about the current state of the market. Check CIMdata website. A few months ago, I sat down with Stan Przybylinski and had a chance to discuss current market trends in PLM. Check my notes here  – CIMdata 2018 PLM Market Numbers – Growth with Forecast for M&A

Here are some numbers:

Coming back to Altium analysis. The article was published by Christopher Donato, Vice President of Global Sales at Altium. The article speaks about the incredible success of Altium and its growth but also presents other vendors performance.

What caught my special attention is the slide that demonstrates current growth potential in CAD / PLM business. 

Image source – Altium

Although the article focuses on the EDA market, the performance of PLM vendors such as Dassault Systemes, PTC, and Siemens PLM is there as well. The chart made me think about where is potential growth for PLM business these days.

Listening to analysts and vendors, you can hear multiple perspectives. According to the CIMdata, the potential in applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in PLM:

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been the “next big thing” for decades. The benefits of Moore’s Law and advances in AI and machine learning have increasingly made that promise a reality. For 2019, CIMdata’s global Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Market & Industry Forum series will focus on applications of these technologies in PLM and adjacent enterprise software markets that are augmenting human skills, bringing data and advanced analytics to the point of work to make humans, and the processes they deploy, more effective

On the other side, an example of Altium demonstrates the potential of being an underdog on the market occupied by the two largest vendors. My hunch – Altium growth was achieved in the market that was not addressed by larger vendors.

Near-zero growth in revenues from PTC and Siemens, made me think there is the biggest potential in some segments of the market not covered by these vendors (and even Dassault Systems). Small manufacturing businesses is the biggest challenge in the PLM market and vendors are struggling to bring something meaningful for quite a long time. Aras PLM, the company that was recently added to the list of PLM mindshare leaders is also not focusing on smaller businesses and leaving space of small companies completely to Aras partners.

What is my conclusion? PLM market is in a very interesting moment. Although dominated by large vendors it has a lot of potential in the lower underdog position market. To find underserved market segments can be an interesting opportunity. 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.

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
3 January, 2016

The end of each year produced tons of predictions and resolutions. Rarely we look back to check what happened and...

8 December, 2023

In my last article about End-to-End business processes, I share some ideas about the importance of establishing connected digital processes...

24 August, 2011

Communication methods are interesting. These days lots of things are changing in this space. Internet, Web 2.0, Video communication converted...

6 December, 2012

Have you heard about OWA (Open World Assumption)? If you completed your Math 101 and Mathematical Logic time ago, refresh...

26 January, 2015

Software upgrades is a fascinating topic. It has been with us from a very early beginning of software. Seriously, we...

13 May, 2016

Happy Friday! Let me think about future PLM moonshot. I want to talk about intersection of product lifecycle and AI. Have you heard...

26 January, 2012

The amount of publications about PLM and cloud is growing. This is not surprising me. There are two reasons to...

10 November, 2020

Small and medium-sized organizations are very interesting. Their problems are very much similar to the problems of large companies, but...

4 November, 2016

I was taking Uber ride from the hotel in Plymouth, Michigan to Detroit airport yesterday coming back home from CIMdata...

Blogroll

To the top