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PLM Leaders
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is a class of software that attempts to manage the lifecycle of a product from its conception, through design and manufacture, to service and disposal. PLM components include requirements gathering, analysis and design stages, manufacturing, product distribution, quality assurance, and maintenance.
PLM is not to be confused with PDM, Product Data Management. PDM has been around for twenty or more years whereas PLM is relatively new. PLM is about product lifecycle and business activities while PDM is more about the management of product data and maintaining relationships between the many pieces and components of engineering content.
On September 26, 2006, Gartner published their rankings of companies in the PLM space, Magic Quadrant for Product Life Cycle Management, 3Q06. Gartner found that the total revenue for the top eight PLM vendors grew by 12% between 2004 and 2005, and they expect revenue to continue to grow at a rate of 14.5% through 2009.
The complete Gartner report has been made available by UGS. UGS has been singled out as the leader in PLM by Gartner. Only UGS, Dassault and PTC are ranked in Gartner’s upper-right quadrant.
Like other enterprise software, there’s consolidation happening within the PLM space too. For example, Dassault Systems purchased MatrixOne, and Agile Software acquired Prodika.
Oracle is shown in the ‘Magic quadrant’ as trailing in ability to execute, but as Gartner notes, most of Oracle PLM adoptors are those companies that had already been using other Oracle products. Oracle has had a hard time selling itself into companies as a pure-play PLM solution. Given Oracle’s recent string of acquisitions this might be enough of a strategy — there aren’t that many companies left that don’t already own an Oracle produjct.
But given that Oracle has positioned its sights on SAP, and given that SAP excels in PLM, one has to wonder whether a PLM acquisition by Oracle might be in the cards too. Like ECM and the Applications business, Oracle may find acquiring technology to be easier than developing it in-house.
