10.5 Summary

---

This chapter gives a concise survey of SCM tools. From the tables, we can see that many SCM tools are available on the market. A few of them, perhaps ten or fewer, cover most of the market. From this large number and from the fact that many tools (including the leading ones) have changed their names or the vendor, we can conclude that the SCM market is still not stable. This is not easy for users, as even well-established tools or vendors can disappear from the market. For this reason, it is important that the organizations using these tools are prepared for changes, and this is possible only if they have control of their development process and understand the activities related to SCM.

Another interesting conclusion that we can derive from this survey is that several large SCM systems use system architectures very similar to that of PDM. The total information consists of data and metadata. While data is usually stored in the file system, metadata is saved in databases, usually relational databases. The similarity in architecture of these two systems should lead to easier integration.

---