Late last week Siemens PLM Software announced that they had won the complete CAD/PLM business at Daimler Benz.

By now we have had a chance to hear from other industry pundits and also spoke with Eric Sterling, SR VP of Marketing at Siemens PLM. It was interesting to get Sterling’s perspective on why they won and to get a potential size of the business. Of course we have all been exposed to the domino theory of large account and industry marketing. The idea being that winning a major account in a significant industry, especially one where there are only a few very large players, will drive additional business from their competitors and suppliers. This is certainly true of the automotive business as well as in aerospace.

While Siemens has some major positions in the automotive industry, namely GM, Nissan, and Renault, to name a few, this looked at first glance to be one where Siemens made major inroads against Dassault Systemes. In fact, Daimler Benz is one of DS’s premier accounts.

The announcement by Siemens was a surprise (at least to me) and the follow up press release by DS was a bit strange.

Basically Siemens won the entire CAD/PLM business at Daimler, displacing CATIA, a notoriously tough thing to do. It really seems like Siemens strategy was one of “death by a thousand bites.” Siemens had already won the PLM side, with it’s Teamcenter software, the factory side with Tecnomatix, and the analysis side with it’s Nastran offering.

Apparently Daimler was examining NX for almost a year before make the final decision. Yet, DS claimed no knowledge of the evaluation. Where were their sales people? Is that a natural outcome of eliminating IBM from the sales cycle?

Sterling, as is Siemens custom, was less than forthcoming about the size of the business. My rough estimate is 2000 to 3000 CAD seats at Daimler, 2 to 3 times this size at the their suppliers, and possibly 7-8K PLM seats, certainly a sizable piece of business.

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