The global Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) market experienced stronger than expected growth in 2006 as more companies continued to realize the benefits of adopting Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) techniques to improve business performance.
According to CIMdata, Inc.'s recent research, the overall PLM market grew 10.4 percent to $20.1 billion in 2006 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 8.5 percent to reach approximately $30 billion by 2011.
"PLM is enabling enterprises of all sizes to bring continuous streams of winning products to market more efficiently, accelerate their product development and introduction processes, maintain high quality, and provide greater agility in adapting to rapidly shifting market and competitive trends," commented CIMdata President Ed Miller.
As the scope of PLM expands, extending its reach from product planning and design to production, service, product support and beyond, many diverse, previously isolated disciplines and pockets of automation are now being tightly integrated and efficiently coordinated through unified PLM solutions, said Miller.
The PLM information authoring and analysis applications (Tools) segment saw significant growth in 2006 with $13.2 billion spent by companies globally on PLM Tools such as mechanical computer-aided design (MCAD), computed-aided manufacturing (CAM), electronic design automation (EDA), engineering simulation and analysis, technical publishing, and others.
The Tools portion of the PLM market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 5.3 percent over the next five years, reaching $17.1 billion in 2011, the report forcasted.
The fastest-growing sector of PLM is for expenditures on cPDm, which is focused on collaboration, management and sharing of product-related information.
CIMdata research indicates that the cPDm portion of the PLM market was $6.9 billion in 2006, an increase of about 12.9 percent over 2005. For 2007, the cPDm segment is expected to continue its strong growth to $7.8 billion, reaching $13 billion in 2011 (a CAGR of 13.6 percent).
Geographically, both the EMEA (Europe, Mid-East and Africa) and the Americas continued a solid growth path with the Americas growing 14.1 percent and EMEA up 13.8 percent, the research showed.
Japan was the dominant factor in the Asia-Pacific regions 8.2 percent growth, and continued investment by solution providers in China and other Asia-Pacific countries should result in even more growth across the area over the next few years.
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