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Using PLM In the Cloud to Improve Business Flexibility (Commentary)

PDF | March 07, 2013

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

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: