Autodesk buys Upchain - what does this mean?
Autodesk is known for its CAD software AutoCAD. Upchain is a Canadian company that has developed a PLM solution. Upchain is not particularly large, but this acquisition shows a trend.
Autodesk is not exactly small at US$ 3.8 billion. Upchain is privately owned and has so far only acquired US$7.4 million in venture capital, the purchase price is unfortunately not known. This acquisition is interesting because it highlights a trend in product development. I already wrote about the purchase of Onshape through PTCwhich shows the same trend. At the end of the day, it's all about minimizing friction losses in product development. Part of the press release is a Slide set, which goes into further detail.
Upchain has superior product data management
Even more important than PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) is PDM (Product Data Management). Managing product data is a growing challenge. PDM, at least for hardware, usually involves data based on CAD. You would think that Autodesk would already have a solution for this. Autodesk had also tried to do this, and under the name Vaultwhich was not really successful. With Upchain, Autodesk now has a modern, cloud-based PDM in its portfolio.
Competition in portfolio solutions for product development
Autodesk is a medium-sized group when you look at the major market players in the product development sector. PTC is a good deal smaller at US$ 1.2 billion. Dassault dominates the market with a turnover of US$ 4.5 billion. Dassault's CAD product portfolio includes Solidworks. Of interest to SE Trends readers is the Acquisition of No Magic a few years ago. Dassaut is working hard to be outwardly 3DExperience to convey a uniform image, even if the products are a combined portfolio.
So far, I have not heard of any comparable activities at IBM. This is not really surprising, as IBM sold its PLM business to Dassault in 2010. I have the feeling that IBM got a bit bogged down. At the same time, IBM was trying to Jazz as a platform, with moderate success. This went hand in hand with OSLC as a framework for integration. Even though OSLC exists in niches, in my opinion it has not been able to assert itself against REST and the associated ecosystem of integration solutions.
I don't see any comparable activities at Siemens either. The last major acquisition relevant to this group was Polarion in 2016. With NX and Teamcenter in the portfolio, I would actually expect more movement here. If anyone here knows more, please write in the comments!
Conclusion
I suspect that we in this decade will see a lot of movement. Small companies will solve important sub-problems in the entire product life cycle and will be bought up as soon as they can demonstrate success. An exciting time!
