Autodesk 2014: How Will the Cloud Affect PLM?

Today, Autodesk presented a look at their 2014 portfolio along with a preview of their offerings for building, plant, product, and factory design. If you missed any of the information, you can check out the CIMdata write-up: Autodesk 2014 Design and Creation Suites Give Flexibility to Innovate More. Or you can look at more information on the Autodesk website.

Autodesk has also introduced a re-branding for all of their suites. You can see the new logo above. Don't be confused, it's not the logo for Google Drive; that wouldn't be right. Along with this new logo comes new capabilities that seek to leverage the advantages of the cloud, and tie these suites together in a way that will benefit customers. How this works in the future and in practice is still an open question. Autodesk said there are already millions of people taking advantage of their 2014 solutions.

This started me thinking about PLM in the cloud and how Autodesk might leverage this technology to make PLM more robust and ubiquitous throughout major corporations. I think Autodesk is taking the lead in this area as they roll out solutions that feature a cloud model, without making the cloud a big deal. Subscriptions to these kinds of tools are not new; Aras PLM and Arena Solutions have been PLM pioneers in this area. But, with Autodesk there is a considerable user base and a large breadth of solutions that makes this an interesting experiment to watch.

I want to see how large corporations will adopt PLM cloud technology to support their global organizations. Larger companies will likely already have some type of private cloud that they use for many activities. However, having the ability to use PLM applications that are designed to take advantage of the cloud could be a real payoff for PLM. These new tools would be smart enough to know when to use the cloud and when to use local resources. The user should never have to tell the application that they want to use "the cloud"; the applications should be smart enough to know about the available resources, and use them efficiently.

I am looking forward to seeing smarter PLM solutions that will take advantage of the could and any other available resources automatically. But, I think we shouldn't be continually talking about the cloud. That's like talking about what types of disk drives are used by IT, and where they are located. The bottom line is: we don't care! IT cares, but the PLM user doesn't care. Just give us all the resources we need and get us what we want when we want it. To PLM solutions providers: give us intelligent tools that anticipate what we will do, and make sure we have as much resource as we need to get our jobs done. I don't want to worry about the cloud, or federations, or multi-tenants, or anybody else living in my cloud.

I think the less we talk about the cloud the better. The cloud is often nothing more than a Red Herring. We get hung up on what it's all about, when all we really want is efficient, easy to use PLM. I hope the cloud is part of that equation, but let's move on.

What do you think?

Jim

The Tortoise and the Hare: A PLM Story

Everyone is familiar with the story of the tortoise and the hare. This fable recounts a race between two unlikely combatants: the very slow tortoise, and the fast and agile hare. On the surface, it seems that there is no reason to even have this race, since the hare will surely win. However, the story goes on to show that despite the speed and freedom of the hare, he is unable to beat the tortoise's focused, plodding approach to the race. I think we can learn something about PLM from this informative fable.

The first thing we learn is that there are two seemly conflicting elements in any PLM implementation: innovation, and control. We all want to be innovative and invent the next really cool product. To support innovation, we must provide a very flexible environment that allows our people to experiment, try things, fail, and try again. However, we also must make sure we carefully control our information so that we can find what we are looking for, support fully traceable processes, and provide the right information at the right time to the right people.

A recent book, "Great by Choice", highlighted the importance of very strict product data management to support the quest for innovation. They looked at many companies in many industries, and found that those who focused merely on innovation were market leaders only 9% of the time. Those who focused on managing their information in a strong, structured way, and who were not necessarily innovative were more likely to be the market leaders. Clearly, innovation just for the sake of innovation is not the right answer.

Today we see many companies that have no formal rules for how they handle information (or, if they do have the rules, there is no oversight to make sure people are following these rules). The very first, and in my mind, most important step of any PLM implementation is to provide a very strong and rigorous structure for your information and processes. The information must be managed in a PDM-type of system, and the processes followed by your users without fail. Product data management isn't sexy, but it is essential. Once the information is managed, and everyone follows the rules, you can deploy very innovative, searchable, collaborative environments, and you will see fantastic results.

What do you think? Are you putting the cart before the horse, or the hare before the tortoise in your business? Let me know!

See ya soon,

-Jim