Siemens PLM - We're Just One Big Happy Family

BOSTON, MA (Siemens PLM 2012 Analyst Conference), Sep 5, 2012 - In the race to be everything to everyone, Siemens PLM may be winning. The company known best for NX and Teamcenter was riding high on the shoulders of Siemens AG, the German juggernaut that seems to make just about everything. Maybe not cars or airplanes, but so much of what goes inside them.

"We eat our own cooking," says CEO Chuck Grindstaff. Siemens PLM relies and benefits from use by its parent company. Image courtesy of SIemens.

I'm listening to a Siemens presentation about its automotive products that include its embedded systems -- those black boxes that your neighborhood mechanic hates but you love because, with their millions of lines of code, your modern marvel of a car beeps as it nears the curb, avoids collisions, parks itself and will soon enough let you read the morning paper while it takes you to work. By itself.

While other CAD  vendors (Dassault, PTC in particular) may claim to provide all the software tools an engineer, designer or machinist may need, Siemens PLM may be alone in providing so many industries both software and hardware.

In fact, in all the presentations I am hearing at this annual anlayst meeting, hardly any distinction is being made between Siemems PLM and other divisions of Siemens. Siemen PLM's CEO Chuck Grindstaff is mentioning many of the other divisions, like he has been issued a mandate to play nicely with the other kids.

This gives Siemens PLM a big competitive advantage. Not only can the other divisions be NX and Teamcenter users  with their tens of thousands of engineers (I would hope they already are), but more importantly, they can go to many potential customers with a confident swagger. In so many industries, they already walk the walk.

We all know energy is a hot topic. It's also a growing industry. The Siemens side of the sales call may go like this: "Yeah, we do that. Siemens Energy. It's a big division. What do you want, turbines? Gas or steam? Oh, you want renewable energy? Who doesn't these days? We got hydropower...wind. Actually, a whole line of wind turbines. Yes, of course, they are designed with NX.

Or, as CEO Grindstaff put it, "We eat our own cooking."

Sure is nice to be part of such a big family -- a family in which, now more than ever, the members are looking out for each other.

Comments

[Ralph Grabowski]

The wind turbine biz has become the unmaking of Siemens AG. They bet heavily on them, due to all the taxpayer-funded subsidies some European governments were throwing around.

Then the recession hit, governments like Germany and Denmark emptied the subsidy trough, and now firms like Siemens are reeling from the crash in wind turbine sales.

Live by the government, die by the government.

[Christopher Fugitt]

I think the best advantage of this for Siemens is that small features that may not get development money at other CAD software developers are more likely to get developed. Sometimes there just isn't the business case to spend money on a feature that a small portion of the users will utilize. When you are using the product there is an additional cost of not implementing that may come in to play.