What I learned this week … came from reflecting on three major PLM product announcements this week. In one week, Dassault is announcing the new release of their “PLM 2.0” suite, Oracle is announcing the next release of Agile PLM, and Siemens PLM is announcing the new releases of Teamcenter and Tecnomatix. Jeff Hojlo and I will be covering each of the releases in our blog, but I thought it made sense to start with some context-setting across all three. I am impressed with the amount of investment that PLM vendors have made in their products in what has been a difficult year for enterprise software in general, kudos to all three (and the others that have continued to invest in this solution set that continues to grow in importance).
Vendors
What I Learned: Is Social Product Development Viable without PLM?
What I learned this week … came from a post on PLM Think Tank (aka PLM Twine) titled 5 reasons why Wiki fails for PLM collaboration which I think points to an interesting set of questions:
Is social computing software enough on it’s own to support product innovation, product development, and engineering?
– Will social computing software evolve to handle more full PLM-related requirements as it matures?
– Will PLM leverage social computing platforms to extend their capabilities?
– Will PLM embed social computing capabilities of their own?
Here is my take on an interesting conversation, and some of my thoughts on the direction that social computing in PLM might take.
Research Rap: Impact of Economy on Smaller PLM Vendors
A quick peek into some research on … how the economy has impacted smaller companies in the engineering software market. This is a follow up to last my post on the impact of the economy on the engineering software market as a whole, with the detail I promised on smaller vendors. Last week I tipped my hand by saying that smaller companies believe they will weather the storm, and some feel they will come out stronger on the other end. That generated some interesting discussion, so I thought I should hurry to post some detail, so here it is…