Consultant Rashid Kahn recently summarized three trends that are sure to impact and change BPM software — something that he calls the 3 S’s:
Socialization
Simplicity
Software as a Service (SaaS)
Kahn’s notes these trends from the perspective of a BPM consultant, but these same three things are impacting every category of Enterprise Software.
Socialization is the integration of tools that enable closer collaboration and communication.
Software simplification will mean that rather than just a few skilled users, more users will be able to participate, driving the value of the software’s collaboration features.
SaaS will allow organizations to be more flexible and agile. Rich-interface client-side technologies are making browser-based clients the rule rather than the exception.
2009 was a difficult year in the PLM space. The sluggish economy hit hard at the industry, and by midyear, CIMdata revised its forecast for the PLM market downward. Fighting back, vendors attempted to fight back and started developing features that expanded away from their core engineering-centric capabilities, diversifying the features that they have to offer. PLM vendors are increasingly adding capabilities relevant to the business side, often overlapping with capabilities traditionally found in ERP systems, as reported by Managing Automation.
Ed Miller, president of CIMdata said that “All of the PLM suppliers have had to address a huge change in market dynamics and are still struggling to adapt their plans accordingly.”
IDC analyst Joe Barkai said that “We will see more and more PLM companies encroaching into what has traditionally been ERP territory. A year or two ago, I said the battlefield would move from CAD vs. CAD to PLM vs. ERP.” And the battlefield has now changed.
PLM vendors are now targeting new features that include social networking, collaboration, business intelligence, risk management, industry specific solutions, and integrations with enterprise and manufacturing applications.
Clearly, for better or worse, the definition of what PLM is and what features are intrinsic to it are now up for debate. But vendors should be cautious so as not to lose touch with their core competencies. Without a clear focus and drive, customers may only become confused.
For the last five years IDC has tracked the growth of the amount of information that is being created. The numbers are pretty staggering — they estimate that by 2011 there will be ten times more information available than there was in 2006.
How can anyone keep up? While researchers at the University of California at San Diego say that people are consuming more data — as much as five times more than we were 20 years ago, the amount of data that we’re capable of consuming is far lagging the speed with which new data becomes available.
Researchers point, for example, to television. While television viewing hours are down, television still ranks as the primary medium for people to receive information from. Over the last twenty years the number of television viewing options has proliferated, but the actual information transmitted in each hour of television time isn’t that much different than 20 years ago, although new high-definition televisions will bump the numbers up a bit.
So if people’s ability to consume information is saturated or growing only very slowly, the only way to keep pace with the growth of data is to improve the quality of the information that is consumed.
Clearly this points again towards the urgency of improving technologies like business intelligence and search.
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