This year, product lifecycle management (PLM) vendors have put many interesting initiatives on display to PLM buyers. These initiatives include the possibility of generating more synergies between enterprise search and PLM, more intuitive decision support in design and engineering, connectivity between direct modeling and history-based modeling in computer-aided design, social product development in the cloud, etc.
Although most of these initiatives need more time before we can really testify to their value - i.e., the execution of these visions is the challenge that vendors are facing - the PLM industry is shifting from functionality-driven to vision-driven.
