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Data

Will PLM Vendors Jump into Microsoft Cloud Window in Europe?

by Oleg on April 10, 2014 · 0 comments

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Cloud is raising lots of controversy in Europe. While manufacturing companies in U.S. are generally more open towards new tech, European rivals are much more conservative. Many of my industry colleagues in Germany, France, Switzerland and other EU countries probably can confirm that. Europe is coming to cloud systems, but much slower. I’ve been posting about cloud implications and constraints in Europe. Catch up on my thoughts here – Will Europe adopt cloud PLM? and here PLM cloud and European data protection reforms. These are main cloud concerns raised by European customers – data, privacy and specific country regulation. With companies located in different places in EU, it can be a challenge.

Earlier today, I’ve heard some good news about cloud proliferation in Europe coming from Microsoft. TechCrunch article – Microsoft’s Enterprise Cloud Services Get A Privacy Thumbs Up From Europe’s Data Protection Authorities speaks about the fact Microsoft enterprise cloud service meets the standards of data privacy in several European countries. Here is a passage that can put some lights on details and what does it mean:

But today comes a piece of good news for Redmond: the data protection authorities (DPAs) of all 28 European member states have decided that Microsoft’s enterprise cloud services meet its standards for privacy. This makes Microsoft Azure, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Windows Intune the first services to get such approval. The privacy decision was made by the “Article 29 Data Protection Working Party,” which notes that this will mean that Microsoft will not have to seek approval of individual DPAs on enterprise cloud contracts. In its letter to Microsoft (embedded below), chair Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin writes, “The MS Agreement, as it will be modified by Microsoft, will be in line with Standard Contractual Clause 2010/87/EU… In practice, this will reduce the number of national authorizations required to allow the international transfer of data (depending on the national legislation).”

Majority of PDM / PLM providers are friendly with Microsoft tech stack. Some of them are completely relies on MS SQL server and other Microsoft technologies. Most of them are supporting SharePoint. Now, these PLM vendors have an additional incentive to stay with Microsoft technologies for the cloud. It can be also a good news for manufacturing companies already deployed PDM/PLM solutions on top of Microsoft technologies and developed custom solutions.

What is my conclusion? The technological landscape these days is very dynamic. The time, one platform worked for everybody is over. In light of technological disruption and future challenges tech giants will be using different strategies in order to stay relevant for customers. Will European cloud regulation keep PDM/PLM players with MS Azure and other Microsoft technologies compared to alternative cloud technological stacks? How fast will take to other players to reach the same level of compliance? These are good questions to ask vendors and service providers. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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How cloud PLM can reuse on-premise enterprise data?

by Oleg on April 7, 2014 · 0 comments

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Cloud becomes more and more an obsolete additional word to call every technology we develop I hardly can image anything these days that we develop without “cloud in mind”. This is absolutely true about PLM. Nowadays, it is all about how to make cloud technologies to work for you and not against you.

For cloud PLM, the question of secure data usage is one of the most critical topics. Especially, if you think about your existing large enterprise customers. These large companies started PLM adoption many years ago and developed large data assets and custom applications. For them, data is one of the most important elements that can enable use of cloud PLMs.

Networkworld article How Boeing is using the cloud caught my attention this morning. The writeup quotes Boeing chief cloud strategies David Nelson and speaks about very interesting approach Boeing is using to deploy and use on-premise data on public cloud. Here is the passage that outline the approach:

Nelson first described an application the company has developed that tracks all of the flight paths that planes take around the world. Boeing’s sales staff uses it to help sell aircraft showing how a newer, faster one could improve operations. The app incorporates both historical and real-time data, which means there are some heavy workloads. “There’s lots of detail and analysis,” he says. It takes a “boatload” of processing power to collect the data, analyze it, render it and put it into a presentable fashion. 

The application started years ago by running on five laptop computers that were synced together. They got so hot running the application that measures needed to be taken to keep them cool, Nelson said. Then Nelson helped migrate the application to the cloud, but doing so took approval from internal security, legal and technology teams.

In order to protect proprietary Boeing data the company uses a process called “shred and scatter.” Using software supported by a New Zealand firm, GreenButton, Boeing takes the data it plans to put in the cloud and breaks it up into the equivalent of what Nelson called puzzle pieces. Those pieces are then encrypted and sent to Microsoft Azure’s cloud. There it is stored and processed in the cloud, but for anything actionable to be gleaned from the data, it has to be reassembled behind Boeing’s firewall.

It made me think about one of the most critical things that will define future development and success of cloud PLM technologies and products – data connectivity and on-premise/cloud data sync. Here is my take on this challenge. It is easy to deploy and start using cloud PLM these days. However, PLM system without customer data is not very helpful. Yes, you can manage processes and new projects. However, let’s state the truth – you need to get access to legacy data to fully operate your PLM software on enterprise level. Manufacturing companies are very sensitive about their data assets. So to develop kind of “shred and scatter” data sync approaches can be an interesting path to unlock cloud PLM for large enterprise customers.

What is my conclusion? I can see cloud data sync as one of the most important cloud PLM challenges these days. To retrieve data from on-premise location in a meaningful way and bring it to the cloud in a secure manner is a show stopper to start broad large enterprise adoption. By solving this problem, cloud PLM vendors will open the gate for large enterprises to leverage public cloud. It is a challenge for top enterprise PLM vendors today and clearly entrance barrier for startup companies and newcomers in PLM world. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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What metadata means in modern PDM/PLM systems

by Oleg on February 25, 2014 · 4 comments

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Metadata is “data about data”. If you stay long with PDM industry, you probably remember how earlier EDM/PDM software defined their role by managing of “data about CAD files” (metadata). However, it was long time ago. Wikipedia article defines two types of metadata – structural and descriptive. Here is a quote from the article:

The term is ambiguous, as it is used for two fundamentally different concepts (types). Structural metadata is about the design and specification of data structures and is more properly called “data about the containers of data”; descriptive metadata, on the other hand, is about individual instances of application data, the data content.

In my view, CAD/PDM/PLM is using both types. Since design is very structured and contains lots of rich semantic relations, metadata about CAD files stored in PDM system is structured. At the same time, descriptive metadata such as file attributes, information about people, project, organization can be applied to individual instance of CAD data (files) as well.

Since early EDM/PDM days, lots of changes happened in the definition and usage of a word metadata. Some of them are very confusing. The traditional use and definition of files (for example, in context of CAD files) is changing. Sometimes, we want to to keep “file” as a well-known abstraction, but underlining meaning is completely different and point more on “data” or “design” rather than actual files. Also, introduction of web based systems are changing physical use of files. The usage of file accessed via mobile application located in Dropbox is completely different. In many scenarios you will never get access to these physical files.

DBMS2 article Confusion about Metadata speaks about some additional aspects of metadata management that getting more relevant these days. It includes data about mobile devices usage (telephone metadata) and document data. Document data is getting more structured these days and often cannot be distinguished from structured RDBMS data. Here is interesting passage that describes the transformation of  database and document based data.

[data about data structure] has a counter-intuitive consequence — all common terminology notwithstanding, relational data is less structured than document data. Reasons include: Relational databases usually just hold strings — or maybe numbers — with structural information being held elsewhere. Some document databases store structural metadata right with the document data itself. Some document databases store data in the form of (name, value) pairs. In some cases additional structure is imposed by naming conventions. Actual text documents carry the structure imposed by grammar and syntax.

Modern data  management systems and especially noSQL data bases such as document and key-value databases can introduce new types of metadata or data. IoT (Internet of things) brings another level of complexity to data management. I can see many others to come.

What is my conclusion? I think, the term meta-data is getting outdated at least in the scope of design and engineering. Originally used a lot in EDM/PDM systems managing metadata about CAD files is not relevant anymore. Design data originally stored in CAD files becomes more transparent and connected to external to design world. The whole data paradigm is changing. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Why PLM vendors need to hire data scientists?

December 4, 2013

The importance of data is growing tremendously. Web, social networks and mobile started this trend just few years ago. However, these days companies are starting to see that without deep understanding of data about their activities, the future of company business is uncertain. For manufacturing companies, it speaks a lot of about fundamental business processes […]

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Why PLM can be infected by digital schizophrenia?

November 13, 2013

Our life is getting more complex everyday. The time when we’ve been localized by our personal computer and document files gone forever. The complexity came from connectivity – networks and emails. For the last decade it was exposed even more with the web and mobile. We are overloaded with the information coming from different places […]

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How CAD/PLM can capture design and engineering intent

November 8, 2013

It was a big Twitter day. Twitter IPO generated an overflow of news, articles, memorable stories. For me, twitter become a part of my working eco-system, the place I use to capture news, exchange information and communicate with people. If you are on twitter, try Vizify to visualize you twitter account. I did it here. […]

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Why PLM should friend Chief Data Officer?

October 23, 2013

Technology space is good about inventing new jobs, titles and responsibilities. Until now, we knew about CEO, COO, CIO… The last one was a very important guy when it came to the decision point about enterprise software. PLM included. The dream of every PLM vendor and implementer was to get closer to CIO to influence […]

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Will PLM Data Size Reach Yottabytes?

October 14, 2013

Everybody speaks today about big data. It is probably one of the most overhyped and confused terms. It goes everywhere and means different things depends who you are talking to. It can be data gathered from mobile devices, traffic data, social media and social networking activity data. The expectations are the size of big data […]

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PLM, Google Knowledge Graph and Future Decision Support

October 7, 2013

Do you remember live without Google? It was only 15 years ago. You should agree, information was less available back that days. Fast forward – good news! Google made a change to its Web search system. ReadWrite Web article says – Now You Can Ask Google Search To Compare, Filter And Play. Another article from […]

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PLM Data vs. Process: A Turn Towards Linked Data.

September 4, 2013

Data vs. Process. The egg or chicken of PLM industry. This topic is  near and dear to many people in PLM ecosystem . What comes first and why? My attention was caught by Jos Voskuil blog post – Mixing past and future generations with a PLM sauce. Have a read and make your opinion. I […]

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