Blog

Over the past year the hype around “the cloud” has grown substantially, but so has the confusion. What is the cloud, should I fear it or love it?  I’ve started digging into the confusion about the cloud and specifically the impacts it has on PLM.

First there’s the question of terminology

Private, public, single tenant, multi-tenant, hosted, SaaS, on-premise, data centers, and more.  These terms are all references to various forms of the cloud at the fundamental level.  Yes – even the “on-premise”. ...

A career in technology often exposes you to some interesting topics and people. I have been blessed to be like Forrest Gump in this regard, in the background in some interesting scenes. During my time at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon I crossed paths with some famous names in computer science and technology. A workshop in Austin included Jack Kilby, one of the inventors of the integrated circuit. I reprimanded Grace Hopper for smoking in a non-smoking area, of course many decades...

While my time in the PLM space is short compared to some of my colleagues (only 14 years), I have been involved with software, one way or another, througout my career. So expanding our PLM coverage to include providers of software development tools is no hardship. Our focus is on development of embedded software, the software that animates products designed, manufactured, and deployed using PLM.

In that vein, I recently had a call with Seapine Software (www.seapine.com), a long-time provider of application lifecycle management solutions. While they are not a huge company, with over 100 employees and...

One of the joys of my role at CIMdata is being part of the briefing calls we have with players in the PLM Economy: solution providers, service providers, hardware companies, and many others. I got into technology in the first place because it never stopped moving, so this is like a little slice of heaven in my week.

We recently had a call with NextLabs, a specialist in “Information Risk Management” who has an impressive partners list, including Microsoft Gold Certified, SAP Certified (on NetWeaver), IBM Business Partner, and Siemens (announcing a more extensive partnership just after our call). NextLabs is...

All companies use some form of imagery to describe their overall strategy or approach. Most geometric figures have been used at one time or another by players in the PLM space. Currently, Siemens PLM Software uses a half sphere or dome to describe how their HD-PLM provides an immersive decision-making environment.

With the advent of V6 and now the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform, Dassault Systèmes uses a spiral to denote the lifecycle from ideation to use and back again, and the circle for their 3DEXPERIENCE...

During a briefing at a PLM solution provider last week, the Oslo project at Microsoft came up: http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/11/introducing-codename-oslo-and-the-office-graph/  and it made me think back to the 2012 CIMdata Market & Industry Forum where I said what we really needed to help us ration our limited attention was to have context built into what we do at the operating system level:

We have too many screens...

Over a good part of the last decade there has been discussion about computer-aided design (CAD) tools becoming a commodity. In some respects, you could make that argument as the lines between high end tools, like CATIA, Creo, and NX and “mid-range” tools like Inventor, Solid Edge, and SolidWorks, have become blurred. (Before anyone gets excited, these tools were listed in alphabetical order, and only represent part of these large markets. In our annual PLM Market Analysis Reports we refer to these segments as MCAD-MD, for multi-discipline, to reflect the broad portfolio of configurable options in the high end tools,...

Unless you have spent the last five years or so under a rock, it would be hard to miss the fact that software is everywhere. Our cars either have computer screens, can connect to our smart devices, or both. Refrigerators are being used as spambots. Your greeting cards just don’t convey the messages printed within, they can record your own voice to go with it.

The ubiquity of software providing value in many products is, I believe, one of the tipping points toward systems engineering. People need to understand how these complex bundles of mechanisms, electronics, and...

The Circle is:

a) A misspelling of the Cyrkle, a sixties one hit wonder with “Red Rubber Ball”
b) An potentially malevolent application in the company of the same name, which is the topic of a popular book of the same name by Dave Eggars (confused, I am)
c) A blatant attempt to make a poor pun as a blog title

Of course, anyone who reads this blog knows that the answer is C. Why? The theme of this year’s PLM Market and Industry Forum is “The Circular Economy.”

The whole IT world is talking SMAC: social, mobile, analytics and cloud. 99 out 100 industry analysts agree that these are the major trends that are affecting everything. The big question is are they actually changing everything?

That is one of the current points of discussion in the product development and innovation space, where some claim we are undergoing yet another industrial revolution. SMAC is combining with new fabrication methods, like 3D printing, and industrial organization schemes (enabled by social technology) to cause some shakeups, perhaps even causing some disintermediation (I love that word).

But is this a revolution? Being a geek...