I had a chance to talk with… Hardeep Gulati at Oracle about the recent Agile PLM 9.3 product release. Product analytics has been, and still is for the most part, a gap in the PLM market. So considering Oracle’s acquisitions of Hyperion and Agile in recent years, it’s not a surprise that the Oracle 9.3 PLM release is focused squarely on this area. The challenge is making this product intelligence consumable to each of the different roles along the value chain – engineering and design, manufacturing and supply chain, marketing and sales. Make the information easy to access and relevant, or you’ll have a nice analytics tool that no one uses. Oracle realizes this and has also focused the release on enhancing an already good (based on conversations over the past year with Agile users) user experience by adding “productivity tools” – for example drag and drop, inline editing, and more personalization. The company will focus their next release on leveraging their portal technology for a common user interface – a critical component of their strategy.
Innovation
What I Learned: IBM and Siemens PLM Forge Closer Relationship
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…
What I learned: This will be the year of SaaS in PLM
What I learned this week… came from conversations with manufacturers and SaaS vendors over the past year. I believe the market is ripe for a SaaS approach to PLM. When it comes to product development, every organization strives for efficiency, flexibility, better collaboration (internally and externally), and easier upgrades. Yet, business models that could enable such benefits, such as Software-as-a-service (SaaS), or even SOA, has not been widely adopted to support product lifecycle management. The ongoing economic malaise, however, is driving manufacturers to rethink how they deploy PLM, and other enterprise software systems.
One-to-One: Sopheon Hypes up its Customer Needs Management Capabilities
I had a chance to talk with… the team at Sopheon about their recent product enhancement in the customer needs management (CNM) space. Through an OEM agreement with German based idea management vendor, Hype Software, the product portfolio management company has announced Idea Lab, an idea discovery, management, collaboration and analytic offering – areas that were partially addressed by their existing idea management offering. With Sopheon’s existing portfolio management and product planning/roadmapping strengths, these additional capabilities at the very front end of innovation give it a strong offering in the customer needs management space.
What I learned: The Front End of Innovation is Disconnected from PLM
What I learned this week… came from The Front End of Innovation event in Boston. One thing that stuck in my mind from the event, based on conversations with end users and from presentations, is the lack of connection between the front end of innovation and the rest of the product lifecycle. Customers seem content…
