Oleg Shilovitsky

I think the biggest, biggest challenge is PLM implementation. So the implementation itself, not technology, not product, not applications. The implementation is something that company needs to do in order to make PLM work for them. So the challenge is that it's not completely dependent on vendor, it's not completely dependent on product or technology, dependent on, on on you as a company. So if you— and this is something that makes everything complicated, and this is something that if we can figure out how to change it can make PLM much simpler and improve everything. Well, competition is always a fascinating topic. There are a couple of things in PLM space related to competition. First of all, there is very few PLM vendors in the world, so we can actually number them as 3, 4, from 3 to 6, depends how you count them. So the knowledge and the experience are making entrance to this field very hard to somebody else. So for a new company to get in the PLM space, it's very, it's very hard, and I hardly can recall somebody in the past that did it on a significant scale. Therefore, the competition is between known large vendors, although in the past, in the past few years, We observed some changes in the landscape. We saw Autodesk decided to get in the PLM game with the introduction of PLM 360, the cloud PLM product. We also can see Ares introduced open source, enterprise open source product, and we can see Ares is is making some changes in the PLM space as well. So these two are probably latest changes in the landscape, but for everything else, it remains old player creating new strategies, buying new companies, but actually remaining in the same. Well, I think the first step every company should do when they think about PLM implementation is look in the mirror. And so they need to learn about themselves, what they want to achieve with PLM, because PLM is not silver bullet. So if you have bad processes, you will not improve bad processes with the right PLM. So you will have bad processes with the PLM tools. So to improve it, the first thing that you need to do is to learn about your processes, learn about your organization, think about what you want to improve, because you don't want to do everything in this one shot. And after this understanding, you can go and think about how implementing PLM. I think the misconception about PLM that I can hear very often is that it's complicated and it can make your life miserable as a company. So here is the point, the point of misconception is that it's not a PLM product or technology that can make yourself miserable, it's about you, it's as a company, if you're doing things wrong, technology will not help you. So don't blame vendors, don't blame products, blame yourself about how you develop products, because everything in PLM is about product development processes. So think about the processes, think about how you develop products, and think about how to improve it, and your life will be better. I think it's mostly about balance. So it's balance about scale, balance about size, balance about what do you want to do, what tool to choose for the job. It's like you need the right tool for the job, so you need to make an assessment about what the size of your company, What type of solutions do you need? And what improvements do you want to do? And based on this assessment, choose the right tool. So if you do that, you can be successful. I don't think it's about questions. I think it's mostly about looking for a partner. So think about PLM vendor as your partner in understanding of your processes and understanding of your business. So if vendor will be a good partner for you to understand how you work, it will help you. It's, it's, it's, it's less about buying a particular technology or product. It's first about how to select right partner. To make your implementation successful. And of course there are technological and product questions as well, but if this is the right partnership, you have better chances to be successful. Yeah, the Internet of Things is like— think about another hype, another buzzword, another big trend, and it's important. But I just want to make a comparison. You know, 3, 4 years ago we've been talking about cloud, and the question was, what is the role of cloud in PLM? And today we see that all PLM vendors are doing something with cloud. So Internet of Things is another trend, is another important thing, and somebody jumped first in this trend and saying we do something, and somebody will come later. It's, in my view, not very important if you come first or second. There are advantages and disadvantages, but Internet of Things will be developed, and PLM vendors and PLM industry will be interplaying with this, obviously.