Saw the news late last night that Oracle has announced its intent to acquire Agile. Maybe this is the recognition the PLM market has been waiting for. Maybe the sign that PLM has made it as an enterprise app is when its owned by an enterprise app company…maybe. Maybe not.
I’ll have to think about it some more, but I think (like all things) there are a few good points and a few bad about this move. On the good side it makes Oracle’s strategy relative to PLM absolutely clear. After a few faltering attempts to build something on their own over the past half decade, now they’ve decided they really want to play. Another good aspect to the move is that it puts even more pressure on PTC and Dassault. It’s getting awfully lonely in the shallow end of the pool.
On the bad side, it does make it tough to have a strong dependency on Oracle as a database and app server supplier if you are a PLM company. Of course all the other CRM companies and ERP companies seem to have figured out a way to do it, so I guess the PLM companies will too.
The old saying “may you live in interesting times” is certainly in full effect this year.
The consolidation continues
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One response to “The consolidation continues”
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Chris, I think it’s an interesting counter-point to the Seimens acquisition of UGS. Wherein the oracle deal pulls the PLM product suite closer to it’s larger enterprise offerings that are mostly industry and sector agnostic but the current UGS positioning appears to further silo products in ‘conventional’ manufacturing and design. Agile brings the vision of a modern cPDM to Oracle without an over-the-top record of execution, but it will find a home in a lot of segments that UGS would find attractive. In general terms these two consolidations place PLM in quite different positions, it will be interesting to see which is more viable.
I’d keep my eye on MS and SAP to start calling PLM mainstream or tout any watershed moment, for now there’s a lot of posturing but the market needs to see real execution on vision (true cPDM across the chain and rapid development throughout the lifecycle) and breakthroughs in SMB and pulling in those mid-market shops in desperate need of managed data.
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