Too busy to craft anything long or thoughtful — I know I owe you a more detailed analysis of PTC’s investor presentation — but in the meantime:
– are companies getting too big? I’ve been talking to people responsible for coordinating PLM implementations in globally- distributed enterprises. They have committees, boards, surveys, comment mechanisms … all to harmonize and gain agreement on the details. Not arguing that PLM isn’t needed to move product development to the next level or that these
decisions aren’t important, but all of these committees don’t add real value — they fix a problem created by not coordinating in the first place. Has anyone done an analysis of the cost of these committees and how long/ often their work needs to be refreshed? And if a committee is needed to decide anything, how agile can the company really be?
– what’s up with the Mac love? My home network has always used Apple products and I’ve just "graduated" to a MacBook for work but recently Siemens announced availability of NX and Autodesk seems to be signaling the availability of an AutoCAD subset on the Mac. Yay — but why? Are you trying to say that Mac guys are now part of the corporate mainstream?
– I’ve sat through over 20 hours of powerpoint in the last week. Marketecture, branding, packaging and go-to-market are all very important but what does this stuff DO? Only offering powerpoints leads to two problems: skepticism that the product actually exists or does what is being discussed (after all, if it works, why aren’t they showing it?) and a dilution of the message the presenter wants the audience to remember — too many bullets on too many pages.
– lots of cool stuff coming in this summer’s CAE releases. Common themes seem to be improving the user experience for all levels, enhancing meshing so that a high-fidelity mesh that balances the compromise between speed and accuracy can be created with as much or as little intervention as the user desires (in other words, those who consider meshing an art can continue to practice while those who see it as a time-consuming part of the larger discovery process can avoid it) and finding cost-effective ways to move more CAE throughout the design process and enterprise. More coming on this as I can get to it.
– one of the biggest issues in high-end CAE is compute performance: which infrastructure set will most efficiently run a particular simulation? ZDnet has a great article on benchmarking that argues that benchmark "winner" is not always best choice. All CAE vendors offer benchmark models and many have on their websites performance data for typical infrastructures used by their clients.
– insideHPC reports that there are rumors of a Sun hardware spinout from Oracle. It makes sense, as software companies have repeatedly discovered over the years that the compromises involved in running a blended hardware/ software business often mean that neither software nor hardware is successful.
More soon.
