Seeing Past the Clouds: PLM and What’s Next
Companies are cautiously turning to PLM on the cloud.
Latest News
February 1, 2012
By Eric Marks
There has been a lot of talk about cloud computing, and its exponentially growing presence among enterprise technology—particularly product lifecycle management (PLM). While PLM “in the cloud” is available today, its adoption can be slow. Customers are having a difficult time deciphering when, how and even whether to use PLM in a cloud. With the type of sensitive information that is managed in PLM, there has been some apprehension about moving to the cloud. Still, adoption is slowly gaining momentum as more customers see the available options and advantages.
PLM software is branching out from its traditional stronghold in engineering-intensive discrete manufacturing and moving aggressively into such process-oriented industries as energy, food-and-beverage and consumer goods, according to a new study released in November from the ARC Advisory Group. Because of this move, cloud-based PLM is receiving more support and higher adoption as these industries, new to PLM, start to deploy newer technology and more-evolved IT computing environments. However, there is still quite a bit of education needed of cloud-based PLM in the market overall.
Perhaps PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Principal Technology Leader Tom DeGarmo puts it best: “Cloud computing accelerates innovation, improves time-to-market successes and offers added flexibility within PLM applications. Overall, it can improve connections across a company’s network of suppliers, time zones and cultures. It enables an extendable enterprise.”
Cloud-based PLM Strategies
The easiest explanation of cloud computing is to view it as a grouping of remote computers whose resources you can harness on an as-needed basis, regardless of where the computers reside, who owns them or can access them, etc.
“Product lifecycle management is a set of diverse business strategies, processes and applications. To identify the right projects, processes and problems that can be solved by introducing cloud-based PLM solutions can be a tall order when you factor in the importance of addressing ownership, location and privacy/security issues,” notes Chuck Cimalore, Omnify Software president and CEO. Analysts agree, and are working with PLM customers today who are grappling with the concept of cloud computing—and how best to address these issues.
Analyst firm Frost & Sullivan reports that most people refer to public clouds when they talk about cloud computing. There are four types of cloud strategies being deployed in PLM applications:
1. Public clouds are typically systems that are shared by multiple people who use the system and have no control over who their fellow users can be.
2. Private clouds infer systems available for the sole benefit of a single company or entity, where cloud data is secure and protected.
3. Community clouds are where only specially selected companies with common or related goals participate in the system, such as partners, channels or a supply/design chain.
4. Hybrid clouds are where a private cloud can extend onto a public cloud for specific activities, and on an as-needed basis. The benefit of a hybrid approach that incorporates a public cloud is that it provides extra performance scalability for the private cloud that would be in use.
Identifying Cloud Services
In addition to the four types of clouds described above, there are three segments of cloud-based technology:
1. Software as a service (SaaS). Sometimes referred to as “software on demand,” it deploys over the Internet and is made available to users when requested. It is usually served as a payment per-usage or on a subscription basis. According to Forrester Research, SaaS is the oldest and most mature segment of cloud computing, citing examples like that of salesforce.com, Netsuite and Google Gmail, among others.
2. Platform as a service (PaaS). This combination of development platform and solution stack is delivered as a service on demand. Forrester Research describes it as an infrastructure that can be used to develop a new software app or extend existing ones without the initial cost of buying and implementing additional hardware and software. According to Forrester, PaaS often can extend the capabilities of existing SaaS solutions, such as Force.com (from salesforce.com), Google App Engine and Microsoft Azure.
3. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS). This provides an environment for running user-built virtualized systems, sometimes termed as a platform virtualization environment. It encompasses service, software, data-center and network equipment delivered as a single bundle. Forrester Research cites examples of IaaS environments as Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), GoGrid and Flexiscale.
Most industry analysts (Forrester, Gartner, Frost & Sullivan, ARC and The Yankee Group) covering IT agree that the power and potential of cloud computing, properly leveraged and deployed, can have a significant impact on the PLM industry. PLM customers are giving serious consideration and evaluating their PLM business processes in regard to how to run them seamlessly and securely connect them to cloud-based data sets.
All that said, today, few systems are fully deployed. The systems are still in the infancy stages of use, despite the technology having matured. It would seem that it is still curing.
Case in Point: The Ultimate Hybrid Cloud Model What does cloud computing mean for business strategy? How will cloud computing affect any enterprise more broadly? Let’s take a closer look at one sophisticated PLM approach where a company adopted all three segments of cloud (SaaS, PaaS and IaaS) within one computing architecture.
Mevion Medical Systems Inc., a radiation therapy company dedicated to advancing the treatment of cancer, has a workforce that is distributed across the globe and requires its business solutions to be available 24/7 on all company-supported platforms (PC, Mac, Linux, Android and IOS). “Mevion is leveraging a ‘hybrid cloud’ in order to be able to scale quickly and efficiently to distributed cloud data centers at far less cost than purchasing expensive equipment or renting/building out corporate data centers,” explains Mevion IT Manager Edward Quinn. “The IT department can leverage the advanced international infrastructure already in place by leading cloud-computing companies and activate and pay only for the services that its business needs.” Analysts view this hybrid PLM cloud approach as one that can bring real and immediate value to organizations by removing the traditional barriers to agility and innovation, including capital expenditure, protracted IT project timelines, reliability and end-user familiarization. Overall, PLM in a cloud environment will enable companies to capture and manage product information, as well as processes to continuously improve the products they manufacture. Customers of all sizes will be able to tap into the full promise of PLM via a cloud. Mevion, like most companies, will seek to leverage technology and solutions that provide a distinct advantage. In this case, it is using cloud computing with Omnify PLM so that the company will be able to expand quickly while decreasing overall technology costs—and still achieving a reliable, agile IT infrastructure. This “hybrid cloud” computing architecture uses both internal and external cloud solutions that will provide SaaS, PaaS and IaaS solutions. The architecture can support a distributed workforce by using key security measures; integrate with the corporate data center to ensure data integrity; and scale across multiple external solutions to ensure reliability and uptime. “Our entire company will be on the Mevion ‘hybrid cloud’ architecture, depending on the employee’s job function,” Quinn says. “All employees in the company can access the PLM solution from the cloud on a daily basis from their computers, smartphones and tablets, both within the company network and through remote secured VPN connections.” |
Eric Marks is an industry practice leader for PricewaterhouseCoopers. Prior to PwC, Marks worked with Cambridge Technology Partners, CycleBridge and Novell.
MORE INFO
Mevion.com
OmnifySoft.com
Subscribe to our FREE magazine, FREE email newsletters or both!
Latest News
About the Author
DE’s editors contribute news and new product announcements to Digital Engineering.
Press releases may be sent to them via [email protected].
