Saildrone Creates Ocean Data Products With Siemens Xcelerator as a Service

Saildrone, a CA-based company that designs, manufactures and operates uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs), is now using Siemens’ Xcelerator portfolio, including cloud-enabled Xcelerator as a Service (XaaS) solution, enabling it operate more collaboratively throughout the organization without needing a traditional IT infrastructure.
 
Saildrone has picked the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio for product design, engineering and manufacturing, including NX software for 3D product engineering and Teamcenter X for product lifecycle management (PLM). With interoperability capabilities of Siemens Xcelerator, Saildrone reports that it can integrate mechanical and electronic design information. 

Saildrone is also using Teamcenter X to improve data and collaboration between disciplines. Teamcenter X fits into Siemens’ Xcelerator as a Service solutions that use the cloud to offer accessible, flexible and scalable access to the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio, Saildrone notes.   

“Our products have become more complex and managing that has necessitated having better 3D CAD and PLM. Our primary focus is engineering—building new products, making our drones and our mission services better—not having to manage and update an on-premise server,” says Andrew Schultz, chief technology officer, Saildrone. “We decided to adopt Siemens’ Xcelerator as a Service solutions because we're a cloud first company.” 
 
Saildrone offers turnkey data solutions for maritime security, ocean mapping, and ocean data. Its fleet of wind and solar-powered autonomous surface vehicles make ocean data collection possible at scale. Operating as a mission or data as a service business, Saildrone asks customers what data they need, from where and the time frame for collection. Data is delivered in real time to government and private customers globally.
 
From a sustainability vantage point, Saildrone USVs do athe work with minimal environmental impact, both in how they are powered and their environment interaction (using passive acoustics for mapping, for example). The Saildrone wing technology allows a mission duration of up to 12 months, without having to return to land for maintenance or refueling. 

Saildrone USVs travel on average between two to six knots under wind power and can get to most ocean locations within 30 days from the closest shore and cover large survey areas. Whether collecting map data of the seabed for a new offshore windfarm, avoiding an unmapped canyon or a coral field or security and maritime domain awareness or looking for illegal fishing or drug running, Saildrone says it puts more eyes and ears in the ocean. 
 
“We chose Teamcenter X because it's very important to have a single source of truth for engineering, especially being a small startup, we really wanted to have  an industry respected solution that large companies and small companies rely on,” Schultz continues. 

Schulz says manufacturing uses it for purchasing and building components in the drones, while finance and G&A teams use it to track inventory. The Teamcenter X integration with Saildrone's other backend systems has also been beneficial, according to Schulz.
 
“Saildrone’s adoption of Xcelerator as a Service demonstrates how Siemens is bringing the benefits of the world’s most comprehensive digital twin to a much wider audience than has historically been possible,” says Brenda Discher, senior vice president, Strategy & Marketing, Siemens Digital Industries Software.  

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.

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