Using PLM In the Cloud to Improve Business Flexibility: a CIMdata Commentary

CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

7 March 2013

CIMdata News

Using PLM In the Cloud to Improve Business Flexibility: a CIMdata Commentary

Key takeaways:

Companies must have swift, agile organizations that can quickly adapt to changing market demands
Cloud-based PLM delivers fast deployment, solution flexibility, and reduced IT cost
Canopy, Joint Venture of Atos, EMC2 and VMware, is providing cloud-based Teamcenter solutions tailored to each company to meet their needs for fast, cost-effective PLM solutions

Introduction

In today’s highly competitive global market, delivering differentiating, right to market products faster is critical to a company’s success as they strive to obtain a “first mover” competitive advantage. Winning companies must have swift and agile organizations that can adopt their products and business processes to meet rapidly changing market demands. Operational speed and flexibility are key factors in improving business performance and addressing the issues of time, cost, market change, and resource availability.

Companies need to have the ability to access the functional applications they need, as they need them, for as long as they need them without having to pre-define what may be required to support a project or program. They also need to be able to use these applications within business processes, e.g., product development, and be able to share information quickly and securely. They need dynamic, flexible Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) environments that they can quickly adjust to meet their business needs. Companies are looking for new delivery and use paradigms that will provide the flexibility they must have to maximize their human and intellectual property resources without incurring burdensome costs and administration.

What Needs to Change

Today companies are not looking to buy “PLM.” They want solutions that solve specific business “pains” for their specific industry focus. Businesses must be able to more quickly acquire and deploy PLM functionality and solutions that give them operational flexibility and improve the efficiency and the pace of product development, production and service. They need to be able to take advantage of new capabilities without having to go through lengthy installation and tailoring processes—and they need to deploy and operate these new capabilities in a cost efficient manner. Reducing the time to deploy new PLM functionality with less (or no) IT support and infrastructure costs can significantly improve operational flexibility.

From a business perspective they need to achieve a fast return on their PLM investment and want to be able to grow their PLM solutions on demand without additional expense or infrastructure. And they want to have infrequently used PLM functions available quickly—giving them the operational flexibility to respond to changing market demands.

Traditionally, PLM solutions were delivered on a combination of in-house servers and networks (though Internet connections and browser-based user interfaces have become common). Solutions were configured for each company’s needs and then some level of IT administration was required to support the PLM environment. Adding new functionality generally required companies to obtain the needed licenses and then configure any additional functional modules to work within their tailored environment. While effective, this process took time and provided limited flexible access to new and needed PLM functionality.

In this paradigm, IT has often been a speed bump, especially in deploying highly customized PLM applications. While CIOs have worked hard to reduce IT complexity by rationalizing and harmonizing applications and establishing corporate IT standards, within the field of PLM this is still a significant issue. Making this worse, the expertise needed to implement and operate comprehensive PLM applications such as Siemens PLM Teamcenter is significantly mismatched with the abilities and capacities of most IT departments. Additionally, where IT is already outsourced the conflict between the outsourcer's desire for predictable, stable and low cost and effort environments contradicts with the customer’s demand for flexible and agile environments allowing business changes like flexible globalization, collaboration, and divestitures.

Companies are recognizing the need to simplify their PLM environments and reduce (or eliminate) the customizations that have long plagued PLM implementations. They are also looking for solutions that have more industry-specific best practices and standards embedded within them (another factor in eliminating customizations). The functions and features of PLM applications are the domain of the software vendors and they are combining those capabilities to offer tailored, ready to use solutions for the majority of their customers. Every advantage of a customization should be carefully compared with the disadvantage of losing flexibility and increased support costs. Industrial companies want to improve the simplicity of their PLM implementations to gain flexibility and the ability to rapidly modify the solution to meet changing business needs. This required and noticeable trend of "simplicity" is the foundation for the second solution component: Cloud Computing.

PLM in the Cloud

The advent of Cloud-based computing is providing new, highly flexible PLM delivery paradigms that address many of the issues with traditional PLM delivery. Cloud-based PLM solutions leverage the cloud’s ubiquitous access, infinite computing resource, and unlimited scalability to provide companies a highly flexible workspace within which personnel in multiple organizations (internally and externally) can collaborate using workflows that extend across the full partner enterprise and organizational boundaries.

Benefits of Cloud-based PLM include:

Delivery of managed services at controlled costs without a customer needing to own the supporting IT infrastructure
Pay-as-you-go access to applications and computing resources, reduced up front and continuing costs
Resource flexibility—scale up only when needed for as long needed
Speed of deployment
Services out of the box, delivered and managed by the Cloud solution provider

PLM in the cloud is becoming a more viable and accepted delivery mechanism. Companies want to use cloud-based solutions to address both infrastructure and software issues and requirements. However, it is important to differentiate the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) approach from the Software as a Service (SaaS) approach.

IaaS is a substitution of physical hardware (on premise or hosted) with virtual hardware. The advantage is the flexibility of the infrastructure and the rental model. IaaS is an IT issue, leaving the complexity of implementing and operating the application to the customer.

SaaS is a major change in using and managing software. With SaaS a vendor takes full responsibility for the PLM solution and the working environment as well as services and implementation. SaaS implies that the vendor also offers a configuration that is ready to use—and that's where the limitations currently exist. Full SaaS for high end PLM implementations (for large, complex enterprises) is not readily available. Currently the configurations that are offered still need customer specific adoption; and user licenses in most cases are not included, as the PLM software vendors normally do not support that model.

Closest to the SaaS approach for high end PLM solutions is Canopy's Dynamic PLM Service. Canopy is a joint venture of Atos, EMC2 and VMware under the guidance of Atos, offering Cloud Computing solutions for enterprise customers.

Canopy Approach

Canopy recognized that customers want a comprehensive, complete and end-to-end packaged solution that meets their PLM requirements. Customers are focusing on the three “P’s”: Individual Productivity, Application Productivity and IT Productivity. In order to make this 3P improvement easier, Canopy—together with Atos’ PLM system integration organization—has established a partnership with Siemens PLM Software to develop their Dynamic PLM Service. This is delivered through Canopy which provides a comprehensive Dynamic PLM service as a Cloud framework, supporting Siemens PLM Teamcenter. Customers can rent managed, ready to use Teamcenter instances in a "Virtual Private Cloud" environment. While somewhat limited, customization of each company’s environment to match many specific requirements is possible. Due to Siemens PLM's licensing policy, customers have to provide the Teamcenter licenses but everything else is included in a monthly per user price.

Canopy leverages Atos’ industry specific solutions and adds its domain expertise to ensure that each instance of Dynamic PLM meets the PLM needs of the using enterprise to deliver a PLM solution aligned with each customer’s business and technology needs. The Dynamic PLM Service includes:

A cloud based infrastructure, deploying, operating and supporting all related IT infrastructure components within the Teamcenter environment
Tailoring Teamcenter to produce a customer-specific environment
An ITIL-compliant Service Desk and application management approach
Application Implementation services, based upon standardized Teamcenter templates and using Canopy’s standardized implementation approach and Atos’ strength in system integration
Application Management services, based upon Canopy’s global delivery model for application support and maintenance

As shown in Figure 1, Dynamic PLM Service is hosted in secured and customer specific zones inside Canopy’s datacenters. Each customer zone has one or more Teamcenter Configurations within it. The configurations could be for different needs such as “Development Configuration” or “Production Configuration.” All virtual machines within a customer zone are unique to a customer. Each configuration uses its own Teamcenter Server(s) and database instance, as well as volume(s).

Figure 1—High Level View of Canopy Dynamic PLM Service Architecture

All the configurations for each customer use shared infrastructure for the resource tier of Teamcenter within a datacenter. The dedicated virtual appliances allow Canopy to provide secured services, while shared infrastructure enables premium features such as disaster recovery at lower price than otherwise possible.

Summary

Continuous pressures to improve productivity, lower costs, compress delivery times, and enhance product quality are challenging manufacturers around the world. Companies need dynamic, flexible Product Lifecycle Management environments that they can quickly adjust to meet their business needs. They must be able to add both functionality and users as new projects and product programs demand. What companies want is a PLM solution that offers fast, simple, low cost deployment and the flexibility to scale in functionality and size.

CIMdata believes that intelligent use of the Cloud and Cloud-based computing resources will help companies to be able to better develop innovative products. Cloud-based PLM can deliver the fast deployment, solution flexibility, and reduced IT cost that companies need to establish and maintain their competitive advantage.

Using Canopy’s Dynamic PLM Service companies can obtain a PLM Cloud solution meeting their complex and demanding requirements. Canopy offers a solution combining the strength of cloud computing (flexibility, readiness, business model) with the strength of on premise implementation (individualization). Companies looking for new ways to maximize their PLM investment while improving their flexibility to respond quickly to market and business demands should evaluate Canopy and the Dynamic PLM Service as a possible solution to their needs.

About CIMdata

CIMdata, an independent worldwide firm, provides strategic management consulting to maximize an enterprise’s ability to design and deliver innovative products and services through the application of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). CIMdata provides world-class knowledge, expertise, and best-practice methods on PLM. CIMdata also offers research, subscription services, publications, and education through international conferences. To learn more about CIMdata’s services, visit our website at http://www.CIMdata.com or contact CIMdata at: 3909 Research Park Drive, Ann Arbor, MI 48108, USA. Tel: +1 734.668.9922. Fax: +1 734.668.1957; or at Oogststraat 20, 6004 CV Weert, The Netherlands. Tel: +31 (0) 495.533.666.

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