Cloud discussions are trending these days. As Autodesk employee, I’m attending Autodesk University 2012 these days in Las Vegas. Autodesk is strongly positioned in the cloud, and you can hear it everywhere. Inspired by the exploration of web and mobile technologies, enterprise companies, design firms and professionals are thinking how to make cloud work for business. However, the devil in details. To learn more about the cloud, I attended Innovation forum earlier today – The reality of the cloud. Let’s admit, we are all using cloud already. Here is an improvised poll made by Andrew Anagnost about how many people at that session are using cloud in their business environment today 67% of attendees are using cloud applications.
Thinking forward about cloud solutions, the following 3 points need to be mentioned – 1/cloud is different and one size doesn’t fit all; 2/cloud is a journey. You need to take cloud initiative, start from something and transform it as you grow and 3/size is already real today. Companies like salesforce.com and solutions like Evernote are best representation of cloud reality today. Salesforce was the the first cloud business gearing towards 3B revenues next year. Evernote is widely used in business. You can check an interesting discussion about you supposed to use Evernote in business.
Cloud Tiers and Options
I’ve been reading Gartner’s report – A quick look at cloud computing in manufacturing industry in 2012. You can get an access to this report via the link sponsored by Autodesk PLM 360. The report reinforces some of my earlier conclusions about cloud PLM options I’ve made in my previous blog – Cloud PLM and IaaS option. Take a look on the following picture, which presents an interesting view on tiered cloud architecture:
Gartner’s paper defined follow 5 options of cloud deployment and infrastructure diversity:
1- Public cloud – An IT capability as a service that providers offer to consumers via the public Internet
2- Private cloud – An IT capability as a service that providers offer to a select group of customers or value chain partners.
3- Internal cloud – An IT capability as a service that an IT organization offers to its own business (subset of private cloud)
4- External cloud – An IT capability as a service offered to a business that is not hosted by its own IT organization
5- Hybrid cloud – IT capabilities that are spread between the internal and external cloud
What is my conclusion? Cloud has a diversity of options. One size doesn’t fit all. When you think about cloud and PLM, remember about different ways to implement it. Different options will work in different GEOs and industries. In addition to that, we will see the evolution of these options in the future. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
