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LBN June 2022 webinar You may be aware that CIMdata has been hosting a series of educational webinars. We have seen record attendance and many of the past webinars are available for replay from the CIMdata Webinar page of our website. Thanks again to all for attending our webinar on PLM Market Update for 2022. In this post, I will try to answer the questions posed during the session that we could not cover. Those of you who were unable to join the webinar you can watch it here.

Stan

With IoT technologies and adoption picking up, wanted to ask if you have plans to include the investments in this space in future surveys?

Our surveys focus on revenues by companies we believe are participating in what we define as “the PLM market,” not investments by industrial companies. We include IoT revenues for those PLM companies in our survey, adding them to their revenues in our “Other Tools” category. We do not plan to do market research on the broader IoT market as that is covered by other market research firms that focus on that topic.

Does CIMdata have a single pager/table cheat sheet that shows the Company, Tool Sector (MCAD, Simulation and Analysis, EDA, etc.) and Tool Name (SOLIDWORKS, NX; Nastran; ePlan, etc.) that can be shared?

No, we currently do not publish such thumbnail views. Of course, we have that knowledge and leverage it often in our consulting and research work.

Intrigued to get your point of view about Bentley Systems, which essentially offers the same portfolio as Autodesk but does not show as much (revenue) as Autodesk.

Part of the reason is that Autodesk gets a lot of its revenues from its mechanical/manufacturing businesses.

Any data on the number of companies who have changed their PLM Software (cPDm) from one provider to another (e.g., ENOVIA user has replaced ENOVIA with Teamcenter?)

No, our market surveys are about the revenues of the software and services companies participating in what CIMdata calls the PLM Economy. We know about many of these deals anecdotally but do not collate and publish that information. Many of the more notable ones make it into the trade press.

How would you categorize QMS systems such as ETQ, which was acquired by Hexagon recently? Thanks!

Quality Management Systems (QMSs) are a focused cPDm application in our market segmentation: “systems that address specific business or functional areas, and thus are focused on a sub-segment of the overall PLM market. These software products are often integrated with broader-based PLM solutions within customer implementations to form a full PLM environment. Examples of these applications are independent view and markup packages, content management systems (CMS), enterprise asset management (EAM), portfolio management solutions (PPM), quality management systems (QMS), strategic sourcing systems, and others.” I think of many of these as being adjacent to core product development, often leveraging lifecycle intellectual property to support “focused” topics. They often have security models and support workflow and other functions typical of comprehensive cPDm offerings but do NOT support core engineering work-in-process management. Solutions from this segment are often acquired to flesh out a comprehensive cPDm offering as suggested in the segment definition.

Sparta Systems, another QMS provider, was acquired by Honeywell in 2020. This segment is also interesting to many investment firms with whom we interact.

How does Onshape perform?

I assume that you are asking about the financial performance of Onshape. PTC offers information on this in their Investor calls, and I would point you to their Investor Relations page on PTC.com for related information.

Can you comment on PTC’s move to eliminate their services business (to DxP)?

Services are a lower margin business than software. Ideally, an independent software vendor (IS) has skilled partners who can provide the needed services to support their portfolio. PTC had a lot of skilled and experienced people on their services team, making them particularly expensive. This is a good move for PTC, giving them a partner focused on helping their customers evolve their Windchill implementations while also raising their margins overall.

Why are Aras, Arena, and Propel not included?

Aras was named a “PLM Mindshare Leader” by CIMdata several years ago. As the phrase suggests, this is about “mindshare”, which Investopia defines as “a marketing term that describes the amount of consumer awareness or popularity surrounding a particular product, idea, or company.” Over the years, we got many questions about Aras from industrial clients and their competitors. Big competitive wins at accounts like Airbus, GM, and Microsoft made the whole PLM Economy take notice. Investment firms started to ask about them.

After we decided to name them a Mindshare Leader, we made the decision not to include Aras on all of the PLM market leader charts due to the significant disparity in revenues. ISVs often use our charts to highlight their market position vis-a-vis their competitors. Aras was named a Mindshare Leader because of how they disrupted the comprehensive cPDm segment, taking expansion opportunities from their larger competitors (supported by their “business of engineering” positioning) and eventually replacing legacy systems supporting engineering work in process and spanning more of the product lifecycle. Aras’ revenue estimates are shown on the comprehensive cPDm-specific charts, which is a more appropriate reference group.

Arena and Propel are part of the comprehensive cPDm segment. They have always been mentioned by CIMdata as cloud-native solutions in the segment, with particular emphasis on Propel, given our promotion of the platform concept in PLM. They are the only one to date to build a cPDm offering on the Salesforce platform. But these two companies are not included because their revenue estimates are too small to appear on any charts.

So, when you say cPDm is the comprehensive set of solutions, then you cannot include SAP and Oracle, true?

The segment’s name is comprehensive collaborative Product Definition management (comprehensive cPDm). Our formal definition is: “Systems that provide a full range of cPDm functionality, have demonstrated scalability, whose products can be distributed across multiple server networks, and have a track record of selling products for use throughout an enterprise. These suppliers typically develop broad product suites that address the full lifecycle of products and plants.”

Both Oracle and SAP offer solutions that meet this definition. They each have “innovation management” offerings that support idea management, crowdsourcing, and helping to refine ideas into projects and programs that can be executed, with an increasing set of formal product requirements. Each has requirements management offerings to capture those requirements and project and program management functionality to help manage those efforts. They both can manage engineering work-in-process, integrate with authoring tools, support configuration management, and formally manage change. They support visualization and collaboration use cases for non-authors. They can release an engineering bill of materials (EBOM) to manufacturing. And, of course, a myriad of other cPDm functionality.

One can argue about how well they do these things vis-a-vis their more engineering-centric competitors. Still, they offer them and have multiple customers successfully using them to support product development and the broader lifecycle. You could also say that they do not have a comprehensive set of offerings that span our PLM definition, which is much broader than comprehensive cPDm. That would be a true statement but one of strategic choice, not a failure on their part.

To SAPs credit, they recognized that while their vision for SAP PLM lined up with those of Siemens and others, they could not work their roadmap fast enough to meet the requirements of customers making highly complex products in the automotive, aerospace, and industrial equipment industries. Those problems and industries are the focus of their innovative partnership with Siemens. They are still working on the SAP PLM roadmap because their solution works quite well supporting the product lifecycles for many of their customers in a range of industries.

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