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Solution providers offering free software, training, and licensing flexibility.
The world is battling its worst medical crisis since the 1918 influenza pandemic. While the virus first emerged in China, geography has not contained it. Cases are being reported in countries around the world and many national health systems are straining to best serve their citizens.
Overnight the world changed. Factories and business shuttered. Unemployment rolls are growing and government support efforts proliferating in countries around the world. Many more people are working from home than ever before.
The global PLM Economy, the community of software and service providers, has mobilized to help their customers, health care practitioners, and regular citizens to meet the drastic changes facing industry and society at large. There are many examples of how solution providers are working to empower people in this new reality. Some examples include:
- Altair is allowing customers to move existing licenses seamlessly from on-premise servers to hosted servers using Altair Hosted HyperWorks Units (HHWUs).[1]
- Autodesk is offering free and extended access to their cloud collaboration products.[2]
- Hexagon has a broad response across their business units. Manufacturing Intelligence (MI) created a working at home program to support customers and non-customers for their smart manufacturing offerings.[3] Their Geospatial division is offering “home office” licenses of the Power Portfolio offering.[4]
- PTC has increased their support for remote working across their portfolio, and free access to Vuforia Chalk, their augmented reality-enabled remote assistance and collaboration tool.[5]
- Siemens is offering free 30-day subscriptions to its online learning memberships and a free version of their Mendix application development environment.[6]
- Upchain has enhanced their Connect the Chain offering so that it better supports and enables current work from home policies by extending one month of free subscriptions for any additional users.[7]
These are only a few examples of actions taken to help companies and individuals remain productive in the face of this global challenge.
At our recent PLM Market & Industry Forum, CIMdata talked about the impacts of COVID-19 on the PLM Economy in 2019 and beyond. While we think the fundamental market opportunity remains strong, things will change in the short- and medium-terms that will negatively impact market results. In some cases, there may be a “new normal” that emerges after the crisis ebbs. CIMdata is planning a public Webinar on this topic in the coming weeks.
