CAD and PLM means a lot of data these days. Thinking about growing complexity of products, the amount of information systems needs to proceed is certainly growing. In order to keep up with a growing amount of the information CAD and PLM vendors will have to bring new methods and technologies of working with this information. Today, the majority of PLM technologies companies use in production is relying on SQL databases.
The following article caught my attention few days ago – Google brings BigQuery down to earth with Excel connector. Google announced BigQuery back in May 2012 as a service that allows you to run SQL query again a massive amount of data. The new feature allows you to upload results of Google’s query to Excel.
It made me think about the potential intersection between cloud technologies and needs of the companies to analyze and process a significant amount of data. Think about analyzes, supply chain, simulation and many other use cases. Google is always associated with the “brute force of computing services”. In the future, we can see how technology similar to BigQuery can be available for engineers and manufacturing companies. To inspire your thinking about that, I could suggest you the following NYT article – The Brute Force Computing Revolution. This is my favorite passage:
The brute force computing model is changing a lot of fields, with more to follow. It makes sense, in a world where more data is available than ever before, and even more is coming online, from a connected, sensor-laden world where data storage and server computing cycles cost almost nothing. In a sense, it is becoming a modification of the old “theorize-model-test-conclude” scientific method. Now the condition is to create and collect a lot of data, look for patterns amid the trash, and try to exploit the best ones.
Brute force computing is behind Google’s successful language translation. By comparing thousands of Web pages in different languages to find patterns, in one year Google was able to discern and refine translation better than linguistic theorists had been able to do with their fancy programs for years. There is brute force in genetics research, too; machines plow though the data looking for novel patterns, which researchers then examine to see if they hold valuable insights.
What is my conclusion? I think we are approaching a moment of time when new technologies used on the web becomes available for masses for a very low price. I want to see how vendors in CAD and PLM world will be able to translate this opportunity into new products and services to solve design and product development problems. Customers are paying less attention on technologies today and more focusing on how to solve practical problems. Translation service is a perfect example of a practical problem to solve. Will CAD and PLM companies create new services that will unlock the power of cloud services to engineers? This is a good question to ask today. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
