SAP Marks Its Territory In the Dog-Eat-Dog PLM World
It is a dog-eat-dog world, they say, so today your economic geography lesson is about the portion of that world known as PLM. Some of the inhabitants are names familiar to CAD users, including Dassault Systèmes, UGS (now Siemens PLM Software), and PTC. There are other inhabitants, like Agile Software which is currently being eaten alive—pardon me, acquired—by Oracle. And there are smaller players like ARAS Software and Arena Solutions (the former BOM.COM). And then there is SAP. (Autodesk is considered by professional analysts as a PLM firm, but in this dog-eat-dog world Autodesk is a cat and refuses to acknowledge the dogs.)
Oracle takes a $495 million liking to Agile.
Look at total revenue and you realize quickly that Oracle and SAP are the true big dogs of the territory. The CAD firms are Chihuahuas nervously treading beneath the feet of Irish Wolf Hounds. Thus we must pause and note when one of these big dogs marks his territory. That’s what SAP did today in announcing its PLM road map.
Over at CADCAMNet I’ll do a more complete (competitive analysis and all that), less doggy explanation of what SAP has in mind, but here we cut to the chase. Here’s what SAP will do to make you sit, roll over, and beg:
2008 (Sit): Simplify the SAP PLM user interface with role-based presentations.
2009 (Roll Over): Offer a “new enhancement package” for the bean-counters to ram down engineering’s throat.
2010 (Beg): Assimilation of real-world information such as RFID data.
[Editor’s Note: The prohibition against yawning is now lifted.]
We tried to get everybody together for a portrait, but only SAP and Dassault Systemes showed up.
