This IDC study, part 2 of a two-part series, presents the emergence of 3PM and discusses the future requirements and opportunities for application vendors, investors, and end users from 3PM.

As enterprises are tackling increasingly complex products and services and managing ever-more diversified employee teams and business networks, there is a growing need to more closely control product development and employee and partner management. IDC believes that these needs are driving the convergence of formerly standalone applications, namely product life-cycle management, project and portfolio management, and enterprise asset management, into a new market alignment, which IDC refers to as product, project, and portfolio management, or 3PM for short.

Gisela Wilson, director of IDC's Product Life-Cycle Management program, explains: "3PM represents the long-term market alignment of applications that until now have largely existed as standalone applications. As enterprises are tackling increasingly complex products and services and managing ever-more diversified employee teams and business networks, there is a growing need to more closely control product development and employee and partner management. 3PM blends the benefits of integrating data, content, and analytics with better business process visibility and knowledge worker decision support ? clearly a powerful combination."