As mentioned in another post, the number of “cloud” based product offerings has greatly accelerated over the past couple of years and especially the past few months.  All of these new “cloud” offerings are exciting ways for customers to start using PLM quicker and avoid unexpected costs.  However, this value proposition is targeted at IT operations.  It does not fundamentally change the value proposition for the end users.  The PLM capabilities are still the same as what would be available in an “on premises” implementation.  In fact, one could argue that the capabilities are less robust because a “cloud” implementation cannot be as entensively tailored or customized (a sacrifice companies willingly make for quicker deployments and better cost control).

I am very anxious to start seeing PLM “cloud” offerings start to embrace social and process interaction between companies.  Right now, all “cloud” offerings I have seen are basically walled fortresses.  This is surely done to avoid risking the wrong people getting access to the data.  However, this focus on security also limits the most potentially exciting aspect of a “cloud” offering, which is the ability to reach people that were previously unreachable or may have not even been known about.

For an analogy, just think of Facebook.  One reason why it became so popular so quickly, among many, was that it allowed information to be passively distributed to people that have indicated they are interested in what another person has to share.  This is obviously far superior to a push model like email which is intrusive and is dependent on the information always being sent correctly.  Another important aspect of Facebook is it allowed individuals to publish a subset of information about themselves in order for others to find them and decide if they would like to share information with one another.

These same principals apply to PLM.  If I meet a new colleague at a trade show I might want to immediately start sharing information with them.  My current approach would be to download the information from the PLM system in some sort of file format and then attach it to an email.  However, wouldn’t it be much better if I could invite them to join my company’s PLM community on my own?  If they become a member of the PLM community instead of just an email recipient, then the company now has an audit trail of data that has been accessed and this person can potentially start to participate in higher level PLM business processes.  Even better, this approach can push the licensing cost to the invited individual instead of the company.

This same individual may be invited to access PLM data from many companies that use the same hosting service.  In this case, the person ideally has a single sign on to access all information people have chosen to share with him.  This should be an obvious requirement if one thinks of Facebook again.  Does a person have different logins to get information about each of the friends in his network?  Of course not – a single login is used and the “News Feed” presents a consolidated view of all activity.  Likewise, the same should be possible with the hosted PLM system.  Boundaries between different companies need to be eliminated to provide a consolidate view. I referred to this as “boundless multi-tenancy” in my other post.

Now, what if the PLM information was presented similar to how Facebook presents photos, or even how 3DSwYm presents its media and blog posts?  Instead of being restricted by the menu system of the PLM tool, I can create my own entry points to the live PLM data that I want to share with my network.  A simple flat list of CAD business objects of interest or a bill-of-material with costing information can be posted along with the social media feedback that people expect (e.g. comments, ratings, etc.)

This scenario I just described is predicated on the individual managing his PLM network of contacts instead of being dependent upon an IT group adding users.  I can imagine that this concept makes corporate security experts nervous.  However, we know the alternative of uncontrolled email and FTP distribution is far worse.  To be successful, very granular access controls will be required for specific pieces of information and the granting of access will have to be done by the individual.  Furthermore, other pieces of information may never be shareable to an external user regardless of what somebody may want to share.  I know that several PLM systems, including ENOVIA, already have the building blocks for such a security model. Even Facebook and google+ have embraced these concepts by controlling who can see specific posts.

So, let’s move the “cloud” discussion from IT operations and really embrace the power of the “cloud” by giving people an opportunity to more effectively share and act upon information with one another across company boundaries.