The late author, Arthur C. Clarke, formulated three adages known as Clarke's Three Laws, of which the third law is the best known: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” As it happens, some in the PLM industry think that Aras’s extreme flexibility and the ability to continuously upgrade heavily customized PLM instances, year after year, is “magic.” And, after all, who really believes in magic? The fact is, the reality is not nearly exciting as the speculation. At the end of the day, good execution of a very simple idea, Behavioral Modeling, transcends the hype of the ‘next-big-thing’ in IT technology.
There’s been some recent banter about flexibility and customization in PLM solutions—most notably Oleg Shilovitsky’s recent post From Flexible Data Models and Free Upgrades to Autonomous Data Services—about whether or not Aras is positioned to embrace potential future trends such as No-SQL autonomous data management.
Let me clarify a few things:
- Aras is already doing what some have claimed to be the future of PLM.
- Aras is not just SQL under the covers.
- The world does not want a single massive, crowd controlled PLM data model. The reason flexibility is such an important topic in PLM is that each company (each division, each business unit, each working group) needs a different data model and workflows, and they need to change them again next month. They don’t want a massively shared crowd defined data model.
At one point the phrase was… Cloud changes everything. It didn’t.
Now it seems No-SQL is the answer and will change everything. It won’t.
The point is to build a PLM Platform that is independent of Oracle vs Microsoft, of Cloud vs. On-Prem, or Multi-Tenant vs Single-Tenant, and also of SQL vs No-SQL. The Aras architecture is not built on any of these and is not limited by any of the known limitations of any of these. We don’t care where the services run and where the data store is. All that can (and will) change over time while the customer’s highly customized PLM keeps running, and remains flexible. It’s the Modeling Engine not the underlying IT technology that is the breakthrough.