This came as a bit of a surprise as the news came in (as usual, via twitter rather than the traditional channels). Autodesk has acquired “certain assets of Inforbix.” For those that aren’t familiar with the company, Inforbix was founded by Oleg Shilovitsky, former executive at SmarTeam, Dassault and Enovia. If you’re vaguely interested in PLM then chances are you’ve come across his blog, PLM ThinkTank – it’s always light and amusing and usually well thought out. In fact, here’s the man himself at AU last year.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Lhi7L-QI38M
The company itself has been focussed on opening up the vast repositories of data created during the product development and lifecycle by providing a single, cloud-based, way of searching across multiple data streams and data sources. If you want a look at how the service works, then it’s worth spending five minutes reading Josh Mings’ thoughts on it over at SolidSmack.com. As Josh said “I’m guessing this is the type of Cloud solution that will be more attractive to people – Leave my data where I want it and let me decide how and if it’s accessible. How’s that sound?“
It’s not quite clear what’s meant by “certain assets” but from here on in, Oleg is going to be Senior Director of PLM and Data Management at Autodesk to push things further. The idea of hooking up a search focused solution like Inforbix with a cloud-based PLM infrastructure like Autodesk 360 makes perfect sense. As Mr Mings said, if you can have a single source of search, but pull that data from wherever it’s found, then Autodesk might be onto something.
Also, the idea that we might get Oleg, on stage at Autodesk University later this year, to explain (even if just for my amusement) the difference between a cat and a dog, then it’s alright by me.
