If you followed my comments on one of previous posts – Cloud PLM and IT Basic Instincts, I promised to have a conversation with Aras about PLM architecture. On Wednesday, I had a chance to visit Aras Corp. office in Andover, MA and had long conversation with Peter Schroer, CEO of Aras. The idea behind the conversation was to discuss benefits of Aras PLM architecture. Aras is aggressive in their goal to displace existing PLM systems – TeamCenter, ENOVIA and Windchill. When you think about how a company of less than 100 people can do, you would be trying to find “killer innovation” in technology and/or business. So, this conversation was about technology. Obviously, some charts presented by Peter cannot be shared in public. So, here my “collage” of the conversation to give you feeling of the atmosphere 
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History and PLM Architecture
Aras Corp. is probably the newest PLM software created from the scratch back in 2001. Top 3 major PLM systems were created as a result of multiple mergers, acquisitions and additional development. It doesn’t say anything about what system is better. However, coming later to the game provides some clear advantages – learning from previous mistakes and use of advanced technology.
PLM functional architecture
This is my simplified view on PLM functional architecture. It can be applied to many PDM/PLM systems developed for the last two decades (actually, it can be applied to non-PLM systems too). Almost all PLM systems were built on top of RDBMS (the exception known to me was MatrixOne, which runs on object database – Objectivity, but migrated to Oracle later). A very essential layer is ORM (Object Relation Mapper) converting RDBMS into object store and providing the data model to build PDM/PLM applications. The characteristics on ORM are important and define the level of flexibility and basic functional capabilities. Business layer (API) and applications and solutions introduced functionality of the system, including core functions, integrations with desktop and enterprise systems as well as many others.
Generic PLM Functional Architecture
Almost all PDM/PLM systems passed the trajectory of development started from the so-called “toolkit” to “solutions” with many intermediate stations. This is a place where commonality ends. Different vendors put their own functional priorities as well as specific technological and implementation choices.
At the same time, I would define ORM as one of the core capabilities of every PDM/PLM system to provide an engine to implement multiple functions. In many cases, the capability of ORM defines so called “data modeling” capabilities. It is important to differentiate technological capabilities and marketing buzzwords. One of the characteristics of ORM is to use a certain level of RDBMS capabilities can be a differentiation. RDBMS (e.g. Oracel and MS SQL) is a very mature technology. DB vendors developed highly sophisticated mechanisms to support multiple data modeling capabilities. To use a right combination of RDBM data modeling can impact significantly future capabilities of PLM system.
What is my take on Aras?
In general, I don’t think Aras’ principle architecture is different from Enovia, TeamCenter and Windchill. The implementation technique can vary, but it will deliver most of the functions available in other PDM/PLM systems. On the other side, devil is in details. Coming late to the game (around 2000), Aras had a chance to learn from many mistakes made by PDM/PLM vendors during 1990s. It is an important advantage of Aras. I’ve seen lots of focus on flexibility and efficiency, which can create implementation differentiations and potentially lead to the advantages in implementation and maintenance cost. However, these things are hardly can be visible by just reviewing architecture and can be only proven by real work.
What about other players?
I can see some similarity between Aras architecture and Enovia V6, TeamCenter and Windchill. Aras claims to be lean compared to other systems, I can see some reasons why. At the same time, these claims cannot be taken in a broad range and requires detailed discussion. I found some similarity between Aras and MatrixOne (both companies were founded around I-495 in MA ). One more vendor to be mentioned here – Autodesk. We don’t have official detailed information about what is inside of Nexus PLM. It will be interesting to get inside of Nexus technology and see it (as soon as Nexus PLM will be released).
What is my conclusion? PLM architecture influences two major characteristics of the system – flexibility and cost of change. Vendors understand it. You can see different marketing terms here – dynamic modeling, insanely configurable, etc. There are no direct dependencies between how each element of architecture impact flexibilty and cost of change. At the same time, overall, it does matter. In modern PLM world, these two things will drive future success of PLM systems and vendors. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
Freebie. Aras marketing wasn’t involved, and no censorship was applied to the content of this post.
The world is changing fast. What was near to impossible 10 years ago tomorrow, becomes a reality today. It related to the field of engineers as well as to the software that used by people and manufacturing companies. One of the factors impacting everything around us is the internet. It brings unknown before opportunities and new problems. An example of creating a different way to work is a community website for mechanical engineers GrabCAD. Earlier, this week, I was following an interesting discussion on various aspects of GrabCAD development on Matt Lombard’s Dezignsuff blog. Take few minutes to follow the discussion and opinions on Matt’s blog. This discussion made me think about the internet, new openness and future of business models.
Non-systematic definition of GrabCAD
I had a chance to look over what GrabCAD is doing and posted about them on my blog before – The Future of Engineering Communities and Manufacturing Crowdsourcing and Cloud PLM opportunities. Take few minutes to read and make your opinion. Deelip Menezes was describing what his opinion about the future of GrabCAD. He was consulting GrabCAD back in 2010. Here is an interesting passage from Deelip’s blog:
To put it simply, GrabCAD is a free online CAD library, not very different from other online CAD libraries. But the CAD library is only a first step. Pretty soon, GrabCAD will evolve into an online Engineering marketplace where members will be able to post Engineering projects and other members will be able to bid on them…GrabCAD will have an eBay style rating system where a member can start building his “reputation” by fulfilling projects, uploading his personal models for others to download and use, etc.
Hardi Meybaum explains GrabCAD using words “Crowdsourcing and Open-Engineering”. Navigate to the following presentation to learn more. In my view, it confirms plans of GrabCAD to develop future online applications in the field of engineering and manufacturing. You can think about Facebook apps applied to CAD domain. It obviously brings lots of questions related to IP – copyright, reuse and many others that needs to be handled on time.
DMCA and Engineering IP
I can see Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is one of the fundamentals of online business when it comes to Copyright protection. History already created few examples when companies protected their work using DMCA. Among them, there is a famous Google-Viacom and some other cases. At the same time, I never heard about application of DMCA to the field of CAD models, engineering IP and some cases discussed in Dezignstuff blog.
Respect Engineering Community
From my experience, engineers are special kind of people. In the past, SolidWorks developed a very successful community that respects engineers and their work. That’s why we had a chance to see so many SolidWorks works online – blogs and shared online materials. You cannot see such amount of online work related to other CAD systems. GrabCAD is actually proven in GrabCAD’s infographic:
To respect engineers is one of the fundamental thing that can create a successful engineering and manufacturing community. Last changes in GrabCAD that allows you to report this model and upload notification shows that GrabCAD is listening. At the same time, in my view, it happened very reactively.
What is my conclusion? Future engineering environment will be different from what we see now. It will be driven by new technologies and business opportunities. It will take time to develop them as well as to adjust existing legal definitions. Clearly, GrabCAD is trying to innovate in this space. Future development of GrabCAD depends on many factors and events. It looks like a fast drive on a narrow path between IP of engineers and manufacturing companies, legal rules and business interests. As we know from the history of the internet, driving fast can bring you a speed ticket . Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
Freebie. GrabCAD didn’t pay me to write this post.
The amount of publications about PLM and cloud is growing. This is not surprising me. There are two reasons to that. Cloud is clearly hyping. Second – major player such as Autodesk is making their move towards the cloud. Carl Bass, Autodesk CEO announced that today’s technologies allow to Autodesk to come with a reliable and affordable PLM system. Almost at the same time, during DSCC 2011, Bernard Charles is announcing that DS invested about $2B in the development of the most sophisticated online cloud platform in the word (he was talking about Enovia platform).
I was reading ECN article Seeing Past the Clouds – PLM and what’s What? by Eric Marks. The article is speaking about trends in the cloud PLM and four possible strategies: public, private, community and hybrid. I can clearly understand the difference between public and private (read one of my previous posts – PLM Cloud: dedicated, private, public). However, the concept of community cloud is a bit complicated, since it is point on how cloud services will be used, rather on if it goes to public servers and multitenant opposite to private server placement. At the same time, I found the passage about “hybrid cloud” the most interesting. Here it is:
And lastly there are “hybrid clouds” where a private cloud can extend onto a public cloud for specific activities and on an as-need basis. The benefit of a hybrid approach that incorporates a public cloud is that it provides extra performance scalability for the private cloud that would be in use.
I can clearly see how it can make a difference. I’m sure you’re familiar with Basic Instinct movie. Let me make an association with IT. The basic IT instincts are control and cost. As I’ve been told by IT people in one of the manufacturing companies in Mid West – if the cloud is be more cost-effective for effective for us, we will be moving towards the cloud. Otherwise we stay in our racks. Hybrid model allows to keep IT on premise and extend to cloud in order to have a cost effective expansion and scale. It sounds like something that can keep everybody happy and, at the same time, it is clearly Trojan horse that cloud providers will put in organizations. As soon as such solutions will be running in production, rest of the game for cloud providers will be to leverage the economy of scale and not to blow up “security” red-herring.
Another passage from ECN article practically confirms that.
According to Edward Quinn, Mevion Medical Systems IT Manager, “to do this, Mevion is leveraging a “hybrid cloud” in order to be able to scale quickly and efficiently to distributed cloud data centers at far less cost than purchasing expensive equipment or renting/building out corporate data centers. The IT department can leverage the advanced international infrastructure already in place by leading cloud computing companies and activate and pay only for the services that its business needs.”
What is my conclusion? There are many reasons why companies can decide to move towards the cloud – better collaboration, ease of install, mobile, and many others. However, the cloud fundamental is about how to drive costs down using the economy of scale. PLM won’t be an exclusion from this game. In order to move towards that, vendors need to pass “IT police” in every organization. Hybrid cloud looks like a good weapon leveraging IT basic instincts. Just my thoughts….
Best, Oleg
