Why does Siemens want a content company?

In an era where new packages are coming online quickly, and the number of parts available is staggering – major original component manufacturers can have more than 100,000 items on their line card – human management of all this takes supernatural powers.

And that begins to explain why Siemens is paying $700 million (what?!?) for Supplyframe and its platform for component data, sourcing, and trends.

Indeed, the real value Supplyframe brings is not just access to spec sheets and parametric data, but real-time data trends. What’s available? What’s ramping in demand? And for how long? Supplyframe says it can aggregate use patterns across its 10 million-engineer-strong database to determine answers to these and related questions. It can also drill down by sector and geography to ascertain which components are ramping or stagnating in demand. There’s obvious value in that. That scale is impressive.

Now, one could argue that even real-time data are reactive, whereas what the supply chain needs is predictive, as in forward-looking. No word as to the degree Supplyframe customers have been bowed by the intense and building pressure on component inventories over the past nine months. We’d like to know.

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