daratechSUMMIT2003

Once a year, one of the key industry analyst firms, Daratech, holds its engineering conference. At this year's gathering, the mantra was PLM.

By Martyn Day, editor, CADserver

daratechSUMMIT2003, held February 17 to 19 in New York, took place against bleak economic and political backdrop, with recession and bear markets on one hand and a budding war with Iraq on the other. On top of that, the day before the conference the fifth biggest snowstorm in New York's history blew into town, depositing four feet of snow and shutting down freeways and airports. Those delegates and industry CEOs who hadn't arrived early found it impossible to get to the event.

Considering the circumstances, attendance was respectable, and through some quick behind-the-scenes work, Daratech arranged for most of the missing CEOs to be interviewed over the phone, or, in the case of Dassault, to give their presentations via video link. Company representatives who managed to arrive found themselves having to cover for missing colleagues. Hardly ideal circumstances, but the show must - and did - go on.

daratechSUMMIT used to be the place where the whole industry would gather to declare how well they did over the last year and make their pitches for the next. While the event had a heavy MCAD bias, it did include several AEC and Plant-related CAD vendors. But over the last two years the summit has become exclusively centered around MCAD, as Daratech's market research has become specifically associated with the industry's incessant messaging about the big future of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). The focus of the event is now on the main PLM players - Dassault/IBM, EDS PLM Solutions and PTC - with everyone else in the industry seemingly happy to jump on the PLM bandwagon. Autodesk, despite its recent mainstream PLM pretensions, was absent, but PTC returned after missing last year's conference. There had been disgruntled noises about Dassault's dominance of the Summit, due to the fact that Dassault has many separate companies and therefore many Dassault CEOs who would dominate the keynotes. Some have also voiced their concerns about the low percentage of users that turn up at the Summit, leaving the industry to chest-beat to analysts and their competition.

Before relaying the messages delivered by the vendors at daratechSUMMIT2003, I must unleash my usual diatribe about the state of marketing in this industry. The daratechSUMMIT has become the birthplace of new three-letter acronyms (TLAs), where both new and old TLAs get to mingle with each other in long, rambling, business-speak-littered sentences (delivered by company CEOs) that simply defy explanation. After all, I guess, if you have a complicated message to deliver then why bother making it easy to understand, right?

Off the top of my head there's PDM, ERP, CAD, CAM, CRM, CFD, CAE, MRP, EDM, MPM, BOM, MIS, VAR, EKI, CPC, RPD, CPD, CPO, OEM, FEA and PLM - to name but a few. There are a few acronyms that failed to conform to the 3-letter rule - CAID, CPDm and CAPE come to mind; their creators obviously didn't attend TLA School and so failed in their bid to gain much of a following. Basically, if a market sector doesn't have a three-letter acronym, it doesn't exist and at the moment if it isn't PLM then it will receive scant attention. I am very, very tired of the lack of originality in the marketing messages I'm hearing, with the constant reliance on these meaningless three-letter acronyms and our industry's willingness to latch onto a word (like “collaboration” for instance), and use it so often and for so many different purposes that it loses all meaning.

What does PLM mean? If I am to believe what I am told, PLM means anything and everything. It's not about individual products, it's a “vision” and it's about getting all your engineering IT to work together. And it’s all quite amorphous. CAD was easy to understand; you could go out and buy a CAD software package and it actually did something, like produce drawings and models. You can't go out and buy a “PLM solution.” By definition, discussions of PLM are hugely general, lack focus and resemble the brain-numbing qualities of Valium, without the addictive element.

To me, the current approach to marketing PLM is like playing charades and having to convey the title of the song “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” to the other players. However, instead of breaking it down into syllables, as is perhaps most logical, you decide the best approach is to try and mime the whole word at once! You might think that your well-honed mime skills are capable of getting across such a complex nonsensical message in one go. But the poor bemused audience can only see some wide-eyed maniac frantically waving his arms about for 40 minutes. To add to the problem, every team seems to have a different definition of what “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” (i.e. PLM) means. It all adds up to a very painful and frustrating game to play or witness.

This concentration of our industry on PLM comes at the expense of other key areas in the engineering IT market. At daratechSUMMIT2003, while PLM took center stage, CAD and modeling presentations were held in a smaller separate room. PLM is obviously where CAD vendors are expending their marketing efforts and money and Daratech, presumably, is there to oblige by creating a venue for the message to be delivered.

With that now off my chest, in Part 2 of my report I will get down to the business of relaying and analyzing the messages delivered at the daratechSUMMIT2003.

About the Author

Martyn Day is group editor of MCAD Magazine and AEC Magazine. For more information, visit the CADserver website.

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