Clarity on PLM

I had the chance to talk with … Dassault Systemes and IBM today about Dassault’s announced acquisition of parts of IBM’s PLM business. For many, this is the dissolution of a long-standing marriage that they are comfortable with and makes sense. They may mourn the loss. To me, this is just the final correction to a legacy relationship that has served its time and purpose. Dassault Systemes (DS) and IBM have been great partners – and still will be. But this move will allow IBM and DS to focus on their core competencies and allow DS to continue pursuing their PLM vision.

Dassault Systems Acquires IBM PLM

A Market Correction, a Return to Core Competencies

The relationship has evolved over time. What made sense when the relationship started has changed based on the maturity of the PLM market. DS PLM software is being used by a lot of major companies, and they have their own choices for their systems integrators and consultants. So over time, DS has developed relationships with other leading systems integrators. In the same way, IBM customers may be using DS solutions, or they could be using software from Siemens, PTC, or others. So IBM has developed relationships with these PLM companies. This is just the natural way of things in a multi-vendor market, and it is probably the most beneficial relationship for DS and IBM customers.

To me, this is the natural course of things and it allows each company to focus on their strengths:

• IBM can now focus on systems integration, business consulting, and infrastructure like middleware/SOA/business intelligence/cloud computing in a multi-vendor world. IBM is not out of the PLM business. In fact, PLM is still very strategic to IBM. But directly selling and servicing PLM software from one vendor no longer makes sense. IBM will transition their sales and support teams, but retain their PLM Centers of Excellence, domain expertise, and consulting resources. IBM will still be in PLM in a big way and can focus on their significant PLM opportunities, but in a way that makes more sense for IBM.
• Dassault Systemes can now focus on selling software and servicing their customers. This move strengthens the DS team, and gives them more control of their sales and support business because it is now fully a part of DS, and working with their other PLM partners. DS can now focus on being a software vendor without worrying which customers are direct customers and which are IBM customers. DS benefited greatly from the IBM relationship over the years, but has been ready to move on for some time. And they made a bold market move to make it happen.

This move, although significant, is simply a matter of core competencies and focus. The legacy relationship just didn’t continue to make sense at this point, and it has evolved in this direction over the last several years.

Impact on the PLM Market

This is good for the PLM market, and I don’t think it will be a huge surprise that these two PLM leaders have returned to more focused roles. The way that it happened (as an acquisition) accelerated a needed change, so that might be a surprise. I think this is good for everybody. DS partners with lots of consulting firms and IBM partners with lots of software vendors. Now, none of them have to be concerned that IBM and DS are unnaturally tied together. This is a correction of a legacy issue in the PLM ecosystem, in my opinion. Now, all is right with the universe.

This had to happen, and the IBM-DS relationship has been evolving in this direction over the last several years. The real question that was outstanding in my mind was how DS and IBM could take the final step to return to more focused roles. The end result of an acquisition is probably the cleanest way for this to happen, and one that I think should work well for both businesses. I would not have predicted an acquisition, but now that it is done I think it was a great resolution. It is a win-win for both companies.

One last piece to consider is that Dassault works with IBM, but also works with Microsoft and others from an infrastructure point of view. Having IBM and DS play more focused roles in the PLM ecosystem also makes those relationships more straightforward.

Impact on Manufacturers
The net impact on the manufacturing industry? As much as this change means to the market (and to IBM and Dassault) I think that customers will see little difference. The same people that were supporting them before will continue to support them, although they will have a different logo on their business card. IBM is still strongly in the PLM business, so those IBMers that stay in IBM will still be available as well.

So that’s what I hear from DS and IBM, I hope you found it useful. What do you think? What else should I have asked them?

I had the chance to talk with … the team at Siemens PLM about their recent release of Teamcenter 8. Siemens released this new version of their Teamcenter PLM software concurrently with the new release of their Digital Manufacturing solution, Tecnomatix. Given time and space in a blog, I am going to focus on Teamcenter today. The theme of the Teamcenter 8 is productivity – “individual productivity, application productivity and IT productivity.” From what I can see, let’s just say that Siemens has been pretty productive themselves, and has invested heavily in this new release. Early indications are that Siemens has done a very nice job moving their PLM solution forward for their customers.

A Major Step Forward for Siemens and Teamcenter

I posted last week about the themes of several major PLM releases being announced within a week in my post What I Learned: PLM, Please Take 3 Giant Steps Forward. In that post I mentioned that PLM was expanding in three primary areas – to more people in the product development process, to a broader perspective on the product itself, and to a greater amount of the product lifecycle. In that post, I said that PLM companies have taken some large strides in technology, including service oriented architectures (SOA), analytics, and Web 2.0 capabilities. Let’s discuss Teamcenter 8 from those perspectives:

Teamcenter 8 Extending PLM to More People

Teamcenter has been developed with a broad perspective on the people involved in product innovation, product development, and engineering. With this release, Siemens is making it easier for these teams to work with the information in Teamcenter. One key enhancement in this direction it Microsoft Outlook integration. This Teamcenter release reflects the “ribbon” look and feel of newer Microsoft applications, and integrates product data management functions directly into Office and Outlook. For example, users can save Outlook messages into Teamcenter to capture and share product conversations, and can synchronize tasks between the two applications. From Office, users have live, bi-directional integration between Teamcenter and Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. Some users may be able to work within Word or Excel without ever having to work directly with the Teamcenter interface, extending the ability to include non-technical users in PLM processes.

Teamcenter also has broad collaboration capabilities, including the JT file format (which Siemens has published) that allows companies to share 3D design representations without the need for the recipient to have the authoring CAD tool. With this release, Siemens adds a new “ultra-light precise” or “ULP” format that Siemens claims can share 3D graphics and related manufacturing data at about 1% of the size of the original CAD file.

Teamcenter 8 Support for a Fuller Product Definition

Siemens has also made progress in expanding the view of the product controlled within PLM. This has been accomplished though enhanced content and document management, which allows companies to include more non-engineering data in the PLM system. For the CPG industries, they have also added support for managing f

One of the most intriquing things that I see is the potential for Siemens to leverage their new relationship with IBM to better address mechatronics, or “smarter products.” In Teamcenter 8, manufacturers can now better manage application lifecycle management (ALM) data to support the embedded software that is becoming more common in todays smarter products (for more on mechatronics and IMB see my One-to-One: Big Blue’s Unprecedented Mechatronic Design Opportunity post) for more. Teamcenter 8 can now go beyond managing the software code file to managing the metadata from software development tools, specifically IBM Rational ClearCase for software configuration management. Teamcenter’s support for mechatronics also extends to electrical design automation (EDA), with embedded support within tools from Cadence, Mentor, Intercept, and Altim.

Greater Lifecycle Coverage

The team at Siemens was clearly busy. In addition to expanding support for the people and products in the product lifecycle, they have extended coverage for the product lifecycle itself. For example, Siemens has extended systems requirements and requirements management to cover the early phases of the product lifecycle. Teamcenter now offers the ability for companies to develop requirements using a template in Microsoft Word. Teamcenters content management enhancements should also provide significant opportunities to support processes and information from more phases of the product lifecycle.

Teamcenter is also reaching out to suppliers and Manufacturing. Teamcenter supplier relationship management (SRM) offers a new capability to exchange “suitcases” of information with suppliers. In addition, Siemens had integrated the manufacturing bill of process (BOP) from Tecnomatix and enhanced simulation process management with Siemens NX. Teamcenter 8 also includes new industry templates for aerosspace & defense and Softlines, Footwear,and Accessories and has updated templates for medical devices and high tech electronics.

Enhanced Teamcenter Technology

Siemens has invested heavily in their PLM architecture over the last several years. Siemens now claims to have 1,800 customers live on their unified architecture, a common four-tier, service-oriented architecture (SOA) for their Teamcenter solutions. Platform enhancements include new store and forward capabilities, faster searches, and easier solution extensibility without programming.

Siemens has also announced support for a number if IBM infrastructure solutions including DB2, Websphere and Tivoli, including a pre-configured option that includes IBM DB2 Information Manager and WebSphere Application Server (WAS).

So that’s what I hear from Siemens PLM, I hope you found it useful. What do you think? What else should I have asked them?

What I learned this week…came from the joint IBM and Siemens PLM event announcing the enhanced strategic alliance between Siemens PLM, IBM Software, and IBM Global Business Services (GBS). The relationship between IBM and Siemens PLM is not new; baking in Websphere and Information Management (DB2), a.k.a. the PDIF (Product Development Integration Framework), and IBM’s SOA with Teamcenter, is. The end goal of this is enabling easier integration for IBM customers who want a PLM system and Siemens PLM customers who need a more robust infrastructure for global product development. Ultimately, I think this is a very positive step in enabling manufacturers to achieve the promise of enterprise new product development and launch (NPDL), as well as supply chain integration – to expand PLM from the engineering workgroup where product data, portfolios, and new product ideas are more rapidly accessible to the entire value chain.

What’s different about this?
Primarily, what’s different is that Siemens PLM is the first to offer full, out of the box integration with the IBM PDIF. What started as “coopetition” in 2004 between the two companies has now evolved to a comprehensive alliance agreement, where Teamcenter can be preconfigured with IBM’s middleware. Over the past couple of years, IBM has spoken extensively about PDIF, and they have forged relationships with the leading PLM vendors like Dassault Systemes, PTC, and Siemens PLM – but they did not have a packaged offering per se. Now, with the enhanced Siemens relationship, which includes business process consulting (across industry), implementation, and application hosting, they have done this. Both companies also continue to support open standards, for ease of integration with the inevitable multi-CAD and PDM environments that commonly exist with manufacturers.

A joint customer, Emerson, presented and spoke about “Teamcenter in a box,” a preconfigured global solution managed by corporate IT that can be rolled out to different divisions and partners. These divisions and partners, leveraging Teamcenter’s SOA, can subscribe to the features they want, which are then served out of corporate IT. This approach is one that could be replicated as an SMB (small/medium business) solution, or at existing enterprise customers who want to quickly roll out PLM functionality to multiple divisions across the company.

Teamcenter and Rational: A Smart Idea
A great opportunity for IBM and Siemens is the integration of Teamcenter with the Rational Software platform, which enables more efficient product development of complex, “smarter” products like cars, cell phones and planes that increasingly incorporate electrical, mechanical, and software requirements, engineering changes, and other product development data. For more on this, see: One-to-One: Big Blue’s Unprecedented Mechatronic Design Opportunity. IBM acquisitions Telelogic and Cognos also could fit into the Teamcenter arrangement. These two pieces should be (and I think they will be) lynchpins of IBM’s PLM strategy; integrated with Siemens PLM, they could provide great benefit to Teamcenter customers who may be Telelogic DOORS users, and are looking for a product planning solution (Focalpoint), as well as product analytics support. Although as far as analytics, it’s not clear how Cognos will be leveraged as part of IBM’s PDIF – but certainly, with the need for better product cost and performance analytics in the market today, the Cognos’ analytics platform could be (and I’m assuming will be) more deeply leveraged at some point.

Implications for manufacturers?
The obvious question is what does this mean to IBM’s other ISV PLM partners. The short answer is, nothing. IBM’s relationship with Centric, Dassault, PTC, MSC Software and others will remain the same; the only difference is each of these respective product lines will not, at least at this point, be preconfigured for IBM.

The challenge of unifying multiple applications, tools, and data across the product lifecycle has been alleviated with the SOAs most PLM providers now offer their solutions on; the addition of IBM’s stack to Teamcenter kicks this unification up a notch. All IBM products are certified to work with Siemens PLM products, and Siemens PLM is optimized to work with IBM middleware, or PDIF, and SOA. For manufacturers who use IBM and Teamcenter, this will enable more rapid access to the right information, better collaboration, and potentially faster time to market.

So that is what I learned this week. Let me know what you think.

I had the chance to talk with … a number of IBM executives at their Rational Software Conference (RSC2009) over the last two days. I have heard some great talks on the role that software plays in developing a smarter planet, and how IBM can help companies develop smarter products. I have heard them talk about instrumenting the physical world to monitor, analyze, and improve the way it operates (a whole topic unto itself, really).  I have learned a lot and shared ideas with some dynamic, passionate IBM’ers and my peer analysts. My key takeaway is not new, however. I have felt for some time (and my experience at the Rational conference furthered this belief) that IBM has an unprecedented opportunity to bring a systems engineering focus to developing mechatronic products, and unite the disparate mechanical, electrical, and software design processes.

What do they Offer? An Unprecedented Mechatronic Opportunity? Really?

Yes, unprecedented. Really.  Yesterday, I posted about mechatronic product development, and discussed the challenges of linking the different design disciplines (mechanical, electrical, software) that comprise today’s products. Ironically, the picture I chose to illustrate the point was an electronic “Blues Clues” toy, because I couldn’t readily find a picture of a real talking refrigerator. Today, I will focus on what “Blue” has to offer to enable better mechatronic design.

What I believe IBM has to offer is a greater collection of pieces to the puzzle than anyone else. IBM has depth of experience and strong relationships in the mechanical design software (Dassault Systemes and PTC, most notably).  Similarly, they have relationships and experience in the EDA (electrical design automation) market. The final piece to the puzzle is Rational. IBM acquired Rational, and with it a wealth of tools and capabilities in developing software. In particular, Rational has significant experience in developing embedded software and controls. IBM would probably also include deep consulting experience and direct mechatronic design experience (designing their own hardware) as additional puzzle pieces. Oh, and let’s not forget middleware and a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to help glue the pieces together.

Realizing the Opportunity – Pulling the Puzzle Pieces Together

With all of these pieces the puzzle, how can they capitalize on the opportunity in front of them? I will share two perspectives on this. One is optimistic and the other is more pessimistic.

Optimistic View -IBM has the pieces to the puzzle, and has all of the assets and skills they need to pull together a remarkable mechatronic design solution. They understand the systems approach to engineering, have strong relationships with software vendor partners, and know how to pull together a solution for their customers.

Pessimistic View - IBM is a very large company.

I wanted to leave my pessimistic view short and simple, because I think most of you will understand what I mean. Big Blue is … well … big… and they are made up of multiple different business units. The assets and capabilities for these different pieces are not consolidated within IBM. This complexity is just the nature of a company with the size and breadth of IBM. I believe this makes it much more feasible for IBM to pull a mechatronic solution together for individual customers than to fully productize an offering. Given the relative maturity of systems engineering and mechatronic design (and manufacturers’ readiness to adopt it), maybe that is the best way to approach it anyway.

Progress so Far

So what does IBM have to offer today? Clearly, they have a lot of puzzle pieces. And as I mentioned earlier, they have an SOA solution (Websphere) to assemble the pieces. SOA is not a panacea, of course, integration still takes hard work and not every partner solution is equally SOA-enabled. But SOA makes it easier. They have also developed a guide to the puzzle, what they call the PDIF (Product Development Integration Framework). PDIF is the solution offering that IBM brings to their customers to deliver the puzzle pieces in a coherent way. I hope to share more depth on PDIF with you in the future, we are planning some follow up to better understand the technology, the capabilities, and the customer successes that IBM has with the solution.

Implications for Manufacturers 

What does this mean to you? As a manufacturer, how would you start putting this in place? IBM points out some very practical areas, which I agree with:

Requirements (and Requirements Validation)- start with a joint set of requirements that cross the boundaries of mechatronic design disciplines. Use the “V model” to leverage those requirements to drive testing and validation of the resulting design and products.

Change and Configuration Management – change and configuration management are hard processes, and they get harder when different disciplines impact the work of others. Unifying a change management (and/or related configuration management) process offers a significant improvement opportunity for most companies, and requires less change to design activities in each of the different disciplines.

These are two great areas to start for most companies, although each company should really analyze their own opportunities. And nobody should fool themselves that this is a plug-and-play solution. There are difficult business and process issues to iron out in addition to some heavy lifting on the integration front. It will get easier over time. This is a highly valuable effort, but it will require some hard work.

So that’s what I hear from them, I hope you found it useful. Sorry for the long post, this is something that I get a bit excited about (I know, get a real life). What do you think? What else should I have asked them?

Note on Systems Engineering and Mechatronic Design: I recognize that I have not done a complete job of defining or discussing “systems engineering” and differentiating it from less integrated mechatronic design processes, but I didn’t want to make  a long post even longer. I will try to follow up with more at a later date.

What I learned this week … came from the keynote and press conference at IBM‘s Rational Software Conference (RSC2009). IBM is talking about how to help companies develop and manage today’s smarter products. What was surprising to me is that the conference is focused on developing software – not physical products – but that a lot of the conversations focused on manufacturers and product development. Are we finally getting to the point where ALM (application lifecycle management) and PLM (product lifecycle management) can be discussed in the same sentence?

A Little about “Mechatronic” Products

According to IBM’s keynote, 70% of products have embedded control systems. This means that your next refrigerator may just be “smarter” than your first PC.  OK, that really depends on how old you are, but my first PC wasn’t all that smart. The point is that a traditional mechanical product has evolved to incorporate a significant amount of software. Engineering and product development has evolved from mechanical design to a combination of mechanical and electrical design (like a “dumb” refrigerator) to mechanical, electrical, and software design in more sophisticated products (like a smart, talking refrigerator that automatically adjusts itself based on usage, season, time of day, or other factors). Another statistic quoted was that 90% of all innovation in the automotive industry is in software. While I can’t validate the percentages, the sentiment is definitely true. Many products today would not be what they are without software.

So What’s the Problem with Mechatronic Design?

There are three very distinct worlds within product development:

• Mechanical Design – The physics of the product. For the refrigerator it is the body, the handles, the shelves, the compressor (or parts of it), and other physical aspects of the product.
• Electrical Design – The electronics in the product. This can be as simple as wiring, more complex like a printed circuit board (PCB), or maybe a fully programmable chip or processor (that in turn requires software).
• Software Design-The brains of the product. This can included software algorithms that are embedded on the chips of the product, or could include programmable functions of the product. Hint – ever notice that some of your products you didn’t expect to hook up to your computer have a USB port? It might just be an indicator that your product (perhaps your tv set today, but maybe a lot of other products in the future) is set up to get software updates from the Internet.

So why is this a problem when developing products? The fact that there are three distinct design elements of a product is not the problem. The problem is that each of these design elements has it’s own lifecycle, and each impacts the other. If the mechanics, electronics, and software were unrelated then they could all be nicely designed in parallel without issues. Unfortunately, what makes today’s products “smart” is exactly what makes them hard to design and manage – the software is a key part in controlling how the product’s electrical and mechanical elements function.

Implications for Manufacturers?

The implications for manufacturers today is that product design is getting more difficult (as if it wasn’t hard enough). Processes like change and configuration management that are already hard for one discipline (mechanical, electrical, or software) need to be elevated to the systems level to encompass the whole product. Teams working on individual aspects need to collaborate earlier in the design process.

This will not happen overnight, but the companies that get this right will have a tremendous advantage in bringing high quality products to market, and avoiding late conflicts between the different disciplines that drive high product development cost and product introduction delays.  This is the future of product development, and today’s disjointed processes will not be competitive when the leading companies figure this one out.

So that is what I learned this week, I hope you found it interesting. I will post later this week on what I hear from IBM in regards to addressing mechatronic design issues, and what their vision is for addressing ALM and PLM holistically. Let me know what you think.

NOTE:OK, this picture is not a real talking refrigerator, I admit it. This is a toy. But toys are just one more example of mechatronic products, and they will continue to get more sophisticated (incorporating physical motion, Internet connectivity, and “thinking” over time).