Simulation plays an ever more critical role in any company's product development process. It allows an up-front definition and early verification of product requirements, which helps in the development of more mature products in a shorter time and minimizes the chances of rework due to design faults. Differently from the CAD world where just a few file types and authoring tools need to be managed, the CAE world presents itself with dozens of different simulation tools that generate a volume of data nearly unmanageable by manual means. As product complexity continuously increases, the use of simulation has become widespread among companies wishing to optimize their development processes and accelerate value delivery to their customers. Likewise, the use of Simulation Process and Data Management (SPDM) tools has become inevitable to enable companies to extract the right value from their simulation activities. Aware of this market opportunity, many software companies began offering SPDM solutions, some of them self-contained, others as extensions of PLM solutions. What would be the best approach in the selection of a suitable SPDM tool in this context? When SPDM is offered as an add-on in a PLM solution, usually the software vendor provides what is known as a "single source of truth": a nearly closed digital ecosystem composed of proprietary solutions to manage the whole product lifecycle, including simulations. However, the reality is that companies usually have their own ecosystem of third-party simulation tools and may even use SPDM and PLM systems from different providers. In this context, it makes more sense to be able to build a central tool-agnostic digital thread capable of connecting all this information from different sources into an "authoritative source of truth". Once this central data model is established, all relevant data from the product development process, such as data from requirements, design models and simulations, can be tied in this backbone and visualized in a single location, making it the official data. Democratizing SPDM means giving companies the freedom to choose how to manage their own simulation data in a broader PLM context, without giving up an integrated data management approach and the ability to visualize the complete sewing data from end-to-end. In this paper, the requirements for a software platform capable of addressing these needs will be discussed, as well as exemplified by some of the current players in the PLM and SPDM market.