Does PLM have a future?

As someone that's been involved with PLM for quite a while it seems to be an odd question. Of course I believe PLM has a future, it's just turning out differently than we all imagined. In the boom times of the last century, it seemed that PLM had a tremendous opportunity ahead of it. There was Agile and MatrixOne going public, UGS going private, Arena coming on as the upstart (BOM.com in those days) and analysts all over proclaiming it as the next great space (since CRM and ERP became household acronyms). So where are they now?

Well, it's hard to find MONE as they got absorbed (assimilated into the borg?) by Dassault. UGS became part of the automation division at Siemens, and Agile has gotten scooped up in Larry Ellison's shopping basket over at Oracle. Arena keeps chugging along in it's eighth year as a start-up -- perhaps with Oracle abandoning the mid-market with the elimination of their Advantage Line (quietly done at Oracle World this fall), the mid-market will open up at last.

So who’s the PLM leader today? PTC? Arena? Oracle? Dassault? Microsoft? Yep, without question Microsoft still leads the race. What, you’re unfamiliar with their PLM suite? Look there on your desktop, with the familiar little X, yes Excel still “wins” the PLM race. By my estimate they probably have greater than 90% share of the BOM’s under management among engineering and manufacturing teams out their today. Still using excel for project planning your NPI? Sharing your BOM with your manufacturing outsourcing partner? You’re in great company, so is just about everyone else.

So, what does the future hold? My view, the majority of the market will eventually get to the fully networked BOM – how remains to be seen. It needs to offer distributed teams a way to get together, it needs to manage the simple processes in elegant ways, and it needs to be approachable by mere mortals – there aren’t enough PLM genius’ to make it happen, just great engineers trying to get products to market.

So yes, I think PLM has a future. And a pretty good one at that. What it will be, stay tuned and we shall see …