The increasing number of mergers and acquisitions and the evolving playing field for all competitors is changing the face of the PLM market. According to Daratech, a provider of information technology services, this is happening due to a staggering number of innovative technologies entering the market each year.
PLM and asset lifecycle management technologies are still in their infancies, and solution providers are continuing to acquire companies and technologies they believe will give them a better opportunity to serve their customers, as well as a leg up on the competition and a way to increase their own bottom lines.
Also, the more a provider does to make itself interoperable (more open) with its own technologies and others’, the more it will reap from the ROI of its solutions.
At the start of 2006, Daratech had forecast that the overall PLM market would grow by about 14%, to just under $12 billion. While this total has not been updated to include results for the first half of 2006, it would appear that this forecast was on the conservative side.
According to Daratech, traditional PLM vendors have spent more than $500 million investing in PLM technologies, while investments from outside the industry top $200 million.
In the first half of 2006, more than a handful of major acquisitions took place, quickly expanding an increasingly growing PLM market. An increase in the rate of consolidation among the major companies is occurring as they seek to reach new customer segments, new market verticals and to fill technology gaps.
Since the beginning of the year, in chronological order, the following transactions have occurred:
ANSYS announced that it would acquire Fluent, Inc.; Autodesk announced its acquisition of Constructware; Dassault Systèmes (DS) announced the acquisition of MatrixOne; Adobe Systems. Inc. announced it had acquired TTF of France; PTC announced the acquisition of Mathsoft; Agile Software announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Prodika; and Open Text Corporation announced that it intends to acquire Hummingbird, Ltd.
Not all money is being spent inside the industry, however; outside investments are being poured into PLM technology, meaning that even the "outsiders" see a big benefit of investing in PLM. Primavara Systems, Inc announced that it received investments from Insight Venture Partners and Francisco Partners L.P; and Blue Ridge Numerics announced it has received a "significant infusion" of capital from the Global Environment Fund (GEF).