THE PLM STATE

The PLM State TBT: Oracle OpenWorld 2010 - A Brave New World

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Wow! I am not sure I can do justice to the Oracle Customer Appreciation Event. After seeing Fergie's wardrobe from the Black Eyed Peas, I think I finally have my flying monkey reference. She had some pretty interesting outfits and looked like Glenda the good witch gone slightly bad. It's not often you can see Don Henley, The Black Eyed Peas, and the Steve Miller Band all on one night with 41,000 of your closest friends. One of the Black Eyed Peas called it a festival for intellectuals. I am not sure Larry Ellison was too thrilled with the shout out he gave to Mark Benioff when he was freestyling but it was a great show with a lot of energy. I tried to get as close as I could, and again, if the video is decent I will post some shots. I wanted to thank Oracle for the opportunity to come out to Oracle OpenWorld and experience the show and share it over the web. Hopefully seeing this event from a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) perspective has given readers some insight into Oracle's direction.

Our last theme is courage. courage.jpgIn today's business climate, I think it takes a lot of courage to hold an event like this and Oracle obviously is bullish on the future of this country and the world economy. They definitely went big and there is nothing about Oracle's tactics that indicates fear of a downturn or from their competitors. As one of the attendees asked me the other night, where in the world would you see an event like this being done by one company? Certainly, not in China or Europe. While Oracle has their warts, you should credit them for their ambition, boldness, and initiative. This blog will discuss some specific aspects of Oracle's direction for PLM specifically in the visualization and collaboration space.

I had the opportunity to meet with the AutoVue team at Oracle yesterday and wanted to share some of the ideas that came out of the meeting. As a background for those of you who are not familiar with AutoVue, it is the viewing a collaboration backbone for Agile PLM. AutoVue also provides viewing technology for several other PLM and ERP companies and offers standalone file viewing technology primarily in the computer aided design (CAD) space. Traditionally AutoVue has touted their ability to view many native formats for CAD and their extensive support of electrical CAD formats. They also can combine information from different CAD sources into a single viewing session. The viewer is closely integrated into Agile PLM and is especially useful for design review and documenting changes to CAD models. Performance for the program has been an issue and support for neutral viewing formats has lagged a bit due to their commitment to native formats. The 2D viewer is built into all Agile PLM implementations but the 3D version is optional and many companies have chosen to forgo the viewer because they do not store native CAD data in Agile PLM. Overall I think that this module has the potential to be extremely valuable to current Agile PLM customers and could be a potential communication solution to bridge the gap between electrical and mechanical engineers.

In our discussions, I conveyed the idea that most clients are less enamored with the idea of viewing native files and more concerned about the end result which is accuracy and performance. Most viewing technology today distills native CAD into a more manageable format that is suitable for viewing. The AutoVue solution does the same type of thing but is more transparent to the user than with other viewing technologies. The AutoVue team is aware of this fact and is looking to be more flexible about this in the future which should open up more opportunities to leverage the technology both inside and out of Agile PLM. The use case that was most intriguing for me is the ability to take ECAD and MCAD data and combine it into the same review session for facilitating better understanding between the two disciplines. Most companies today still struggle with the handoff between electrical and mechanical departments and most of the solutions I have seen to try address this from CAD vendors seem very involved and require a significant commitment in infrastructure and process. One of the challenges this tends to present is that both organizations tend to have their own "wip" environments and processes and are not too keen on compromising their efficiencies to improve communication. This is somewhat of a management issue but a lot of executives are loathed to tinker with these engineering "black boxes". AutoVue potentially offers some common ground. With its ability to view and combine native ECAD and MCAD data it could prove to be a useful ad hoc review tool to help companies better understand how electrical and mechanical data interfaces and allow for better communication when change occurs. Ideally this would all be governed by a PLM solution to control the flow of data but it is not mandatory. Our plan is to develop some use cases and data sets working with mechanical and electrical domain experts to put together a straightforward approach to this issue. I think AutoVue's neutrality in the CAD space might help with many companies and if a solution can be deployed that is fairly lightweight I think a lot of organizations would look to adopt something like this. We will work further with AutoVue and I will keep you posted on our progress.

I am pushing the limits of my checkout time here at the St. Francis so I will wrap things up with a few final thoughts. Overall, the presentations this year were very strong. Most PLM presentations featured an Oracle content expert and an end user to validate the solution. Partners like CPG Solutions and Kalypso were involved in some nice sessions. Oracle rolled out a few new capabilities particularly in Pharma, Customer Needs Management, and Engineering Collaboration. Some of these solutions will need more customer input before they are useful but the direction of the company seems positive and there is a lot more energy around Agile PLM than in previous years. I know from my interactions with the sales teams that revenues for Agile PLM are up so there seems to be some strong momentum around the product which is encouraging. I have been told that the presentations will be made public at the end of the show so I will make a point of publishing the slides so people can see firsthand what Oracle and their clients are doing with Agile PLM. Thanks for reading the blog and I promise no more Wizard of OZ references.

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