I’ve been watching what happens around Oracle Open World 11 earlier this week. Among multiple topics, the announcement about Oracle Cloud and controversy around cancellation of Mark Benioff’s keynote caught my attention. Oracle unveils “Oracle Public Cloud” and claims “no locking” there. You can read Oracle announcement here. Navigate your browser to the following Informationweek article to read more. Oracle announcement and Salesforce Mark Benioff canceled keynote raised lots of discussions about the cloud, options, single tenant vs. multi–tenant cloud solution and much more. Take a look on the following passage from Information Week about that:
Ellison underscored the difference between Oracle’s public cloud approach and Salesforce’s by saying a Java Enterprise Edition application would run in either Oracle’s or Amazon Web Services‘ EC2 infrastructure, but it wouldn’t run in Salesforce’s. The Oracle cloud will be “open and standards based,” he said. “If you want Apex, that would be Salesforce,” he said, referring to Saleforce’s proprietary language. “The Salesforce.com cloud is kind of sticky. You can check in, but you can’t check out. It’s the roach motel of clouds,” he said. The contrary-to-Salesforce focus came just four hours after Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff held his own event next to Oracle OpenWorld where he attacked Oracle’s “single tenant” approach to selling software and its retro commitment to “Exadata mainframe machines.”
Here is Oracle’s definition of public cloud.
At the same time, Mark Benioff of Salesforce counter argument with Oracle about what is “True Cloud” solution. I’m not sure claiming “ true” or “false” is something that actually can apply. You can watch an interesting video Q&A where Benioff explains what means “true cloud” as well as shape out three key cloud principles.
According to Benioff, the following 3 principles are absolutely important when you are talking about cloud solutions. Here they are:
1- Portable Logic
2- Portable Data
3- Open API
I found these three principles resonated with some of my thoughts about how CAD/PLM cloud solutions can be organized. Yesterday, I was discussing Autodesk cloud announcements. Few weeks ago, I was trying cloud solutions from Dassault. It is very interesting to see if we can apply these 3 key cloud principles to CAD/PLM cloud solutions. Here are my initial thoughts.
Portable Logic
Nobody in CAD /PLM world is talking about portable logic. I believe this level of details is not available (at least to me). Both, Autodesk and Dassault are claiming to leverage Amazon’s AWS, which means for me virtualization on the level of server environment and not on the level of business logic and components.
Portable Data
This is even more interesting. Is it possible to get data from Autodesk cloud and place it to Dassault cloud? If we talk about CAD, we will be going back to discussions about CAD formats. If we talk about PDM/PLM solutions, the situation can be even more complex. Each data–management solution relies on proprietary data schema and servers. When it still not clear what will be core cloud data management solution for Autodesk, Dassault already announced that Enovia V6 is a platform to be used for all Dassault cloud products. How to make Enovia V6 data portable is another interesting question to discuss.
Open API.
It is, probably, the easiest topic and CAD/PLM providers are dealing with this already many years. A really interesting question – how many of APIs will be available on the cloud? I wasn’t able to find this information either.
What is my conclusion? I think CAD/PLM cloud battle is yet to come. Autodesk and Dassault are two major players on this scene and they are just gathering capabilities and checking arsenals of their cloud solutions. I’d expect next few years to be especially interesting to see how CAD/PLM vendors will develop cloud solutions and test it on their existing and future customers. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
