30 Minute Interview

“Deployment of PLM is a strategic management decision”

Suman Bose, Country Director, Dassault Systemes speaks to Dominic K on developments in Product Lifecycle Management and the trends observed in India vis-a-vis this concept.

Suman Bose

Tell us about Dassault Systemes’ recent tie-up with L&T InfoTech.

Under the terms of the MoU, L&T Infotech will provide consulting, development and implementation services around Dassault Systemes’ end-to-end PLM portfolio. The first end-to-end implementation by the partnership of L&T Infotech and DS is for the heavy engineering division of L&T for a range of DS products in order to facilitate knowledge management and to reduce the cycle time for engineering design, as well as for product delivery.

We are the largest PLM solutions vendor in the country and large companies such as Tata Motors, Ashok Leyland, Eicher Motors, Hero Honda among others, use our solutions extensively.

What is your focus in India and how different is the Indian market?

We are witnessing large scale adoption of our PLM solution across multiple segments and company types in India, mirroring what’s happening worldwide. This has made us the largest PLM solution vendor in India. We have a large R&D presence in India which will continue to expand and deliver high quality products globally from India. This is one of the key elements of our India strategy. Overall, Dassault Systemes is bullish about India and is committed to continue its investment in India.

What are the challenges you find here?

Deployment of PLM is a strategic management decision. Diligent understanding of PLM cost-benefit trade off is required at highest management levels in order to secure long term future benefits for the company. Technology spend is really a great cost-out and revenue-up opportunity. A delayed decision can severely diminish the utility of the same.

The amount of time and money that we are collectively wasting due to infrastructure bottlenecks can derail the India growth story.

Small and medium businesses’ have limited access to easy term credit and financial costs are higher. For any economy to prosper, SMB segment has to be robust and healthy. For PLM, SMBs globally play a strategic role as they fuel a lot of upstream innovation and constitute a large market segment.

There is an increasing scarcity of adequately trained resources in India. This is across multiple disciplines and true for PLM technology practitioners too. This may apply a brake to India’s overall growth, unless industry and government takes pre-emptive steps to address this skill gap.

What are yours plans for this year?

We will continue to focus on customer success in India. To achieve this, we will grow a more robust and knowledgeable partner ecosystem that can truly become solution and best practices consultants for our customers. We will have industry’s best customer-partner-company ecosystem in India.

Our global customers and their service providers are pushing the demand of our solution and thereby facing scarcity of trained resources in India. We will focus on developing certified skilled resources for our solutions and will also increase our overall footprint in India to reach our customers better.

Is the 3D PLM market in India picking up? What is the trend globally?

The PLM Market in India has displayed accelerated growth over the past three years essentially fuelled by overall macroeconomic growth and also sector growth in automotive, aerospace, industrial equipments and outsourced design and engineering services. India’s contribution to global PLM industry is also felt greatly in the areas of developing products for global consumption. We estimate that total PLM footprint in India including domestic software and services sales, global services and product deliveries would be over $0.3 billion by end 2007.

Globally, PLM is one of the fastest growing segments in enterprise IT space, growing about 12% to 15% annually, compared to single-digit growth for other enterprise applications. As a market leader, Dassault Systemes is uniquely positioned to grow the PLM footprint in a much broader market. We are increasing the adoption of PLM technology across multiple non-traditional market segments like apparel and footwear, food processing, medical equipment and telecom.

What is your strategy for India and the rest of the world?

At the beginning of 2006, we commanded over 23 percent of the global PLM market.

2007 will be another year where we will raise the bar of our market and technology leadership higher. We will consolidate our leadership in established segments like automotive, aerospace & defence, heavy engineering, ship building, etc., and will penetrate beachhead accounts in emerging segments like garments, medical equipments, FMCG and services.