As you may know, I’m here at the PLM Forum in Manheim, Germany to represent the PLM MarketPlace.

Yesterday, I was exchanging on our “online shopping” experiences with a few colleagues from DS and some of our Partners. It appeared to me that online shopping is not “natural” for everybody, maybe because I’m a “digital native” as Jacques says! As we were talking, the discussion came to the PLM MarketPlace and some people asked me how it is possible today to sell PLM software online?

Well, my answer was simple: “we do it like eBay or Amazon sell books, CDs, DVD,…”. As a matter of fact, it is not 100% true, of course! PLM is much more complex than the latest book of Tom Clancy. But if we focus on the online shopping process, this is exactly the same!

Have a look at this video to see how Amazon and PLM MarketPlace are close:

See the similarities?:
- Intuitive search
- Product data sheets
- Add to cart button
- Check out
- Contact form

Only five key and quick steps to get the most appropriate product! Of course, the purpose of PLM MarketPlace is not to allow you to pay online but to find a solution you need and then to be assisted by a VAR to get an appropriate price and the knowledge to implement and use it. Connecting Partners in fact!

So, in a nutshell, as I told to my folks yesterday: “PLM MarketPlace is a kind of Amazon for PLM”: browse, find, be contacted, buy!

Ready to shop?

Anthony

PLM requirements of our customers are fullfilled by 400+ highly sophisticated solutions (provided by DS), as well as 400+ complementary applications (provided by our Software Partners). This is nice for major accounts, but sometimes represents too many possibilities for the Small and medium Business. This is why DS developped CATIA PLM Express and DELMIA PLM Express to make decisions easy in this segment, and simplify VARs Sales Reps' lives when providing packaging advices to customers.

On PLM MarketPlace, customers can browse today 130 customized solutions provided by 25 referenced partners. So we wanted to have a similar approach to simplify the process of selection, because some partner products are sometimes completely unknown by their potential buyers. This is why we have redesign the discovery experience and implemented a visual and intuitive search engine based on user industries and roles such as Style, Manufacturer or Robotics Planner. With this natural approach customers will discover our catalog without having any pre-existing knowledge of referenced products, and we'll capitalize on our Industry and PLM Express visuals. Of course, customers may still search by keywords, referenced partner / product or domain / sub-domain.

Customers are getting easy access to detailed information (as on our corporate website), but on PLM MarketPlace the benefit for you VARs is that we are pushing them to give contact informations in order to generate leads for partner products.

Any comments on this new catalog discovery?

Jacques

This week your PLM MarketPlace team is at a major e-commerce event hold in Paris. This is quite new at Dassault-Systemes, but it is starting to be a very popular event among our Marketing & Sales Community.

In such event we are grabbing best-practices about e-business that will have direct impact on our website's business performance. Based on such approaches we have continuously redesigned our website in order to be better found by search engines and to generate traffic to our showcase. We have also started to extend our cross-linking program to the VAR community and published part of our catalog to be discovered by final customers. At this point, prices and other sensitive information remain confidential, available only to you VARs in this private section.

The direct impact for the VAR community in terms of business is that we now have a public catalog where prospects can request a quote. When doing this, customers give their full identity which is then managed by us as a lead provided to both Referenced Partners and you VARs.
More to come

Jacques