Over the last couple of years, and especially the last few months, software companies have announced numerous product offerings that are hosted on the “cloud”. Dassault Systèmes already has solutions available on the "cloud" such as n!Fuze and n!Volve. Most online offerings are a great way for a company to quickly adopt PLM concepts. However, what should be the deployment approach when a company already has a well-established “on premises” PLM implementation? How can they best leverage “cloud” capabilities?
I believe that two things are going to have to happen for “cloud” alternatives to make a difference for the thousands of companies that already have invested significant time and money in their “on premises” PLM deployments. First, the “cloud” capability needs to be looked upon as an extension to the existing “on premises” implementation with capabilities not previously available and/or users not previously reached. Some potential examples are:
- Online project member services to participate in a project
- Online ideation services to express new product ideas that are formalized as requirements by an “on premises” product manager user
- Online materials compliancy declaration services to fulfill requests from an “on premises” compliance engineer user
- Online multi-catalog search services allow users to search for publicly available and indexed product catalog data provided by the host company
- Online collaboration partner search services for companies to publish their capabilities in order for new customer and supplier relationships to be established
Second, the “cloud” capabilities must be available in an “unbounded multi-tenant” environment that allows a user to seamlessly navigate from one tenant to the next. It is important to stress the “unbounded” concept since multi-tenancy in its simplest form is just allowing multiple implementations to exist in the same cloud instance, but not necessarily interact with one another. With this concept of “unbounded” or “without boundaries” multi-tenancy, I envision a user to have a single login that allows them to access capabilities from one or more companies that have chosen to extend their “on premises” implementation to the “cloud”. Ideally, a composite view of the activity from all companies can be created for the “cloud” user. For instance, each of the scenarios listed above would be enriched by:
- A single project task list for a supplier from all of his customer companies
- A single interface for a customer user to submit new ideas to any company that is asking for input
- A single materials declaration request list for a supplier to complete from all of his customers
- The online multi-catalog search services spanning the data from all companies that the “cloud” user can access
- The online collaboration partner search spanning all companies that the “cloud” user can access
This really is not a new idea. It is the basic concept of the “business-to-business” buzz from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Early proponents of some of these concepts were companies such as e2open and Covisint. What has changed now is that the underlying technology and support services are so much stronger to make boundless multi-tenancy possible. I have captured this idea in the following diagram:
Which of these online concepts interest you? Do you think that these online concepts would make it easier for you to achieve your product development goals? Please read the following document for more details on this topic. I look forward to your feedback.
