Will enterprise PLM embrace hybrid cloud?

Cloud is trending and we can see more examples of how cloud technologies applies in business. PLM vendors are not standing aside from the cloud. You may see different ways PLM companies are developing their cloud PLM strategies. It starts from public cloud offering coming from Autodesk PLM 360 and Arena and ends up with Siemens PLM Teamcenter leveraging IaaS, Windchill hosted by IBM and Dassault Enovia presenting their solutions as “online system”.

What is important is to look on customer realities these days. Let’s face the facts. Almost every manufacturing company these days have a significant amount of enterprise software deployed in house. The larger company you go, you discover more enterprise system managed by company IT. While cloud can be promising opportunity, co-existence of public cloud systems and existing IT can become a problem and impact the speed of cloud deployments and developments. In such context, development of “hybrid clouds” can become an interesting option, in my view.

Earlier today, my attention was caught by Rackspace article – Rackspace Study: The Case for Hybrid cloud. Rackspace is a growing outfit specialized in hosting and cloud infrastructure. Read the article and make your opinion. The following passage explains in a nutshell the idea:

One big trend that has gained considerable momentum with these large organizations is the use of hybrid clouds, which is basically the usage of cloud from an IaaS provider alongside other platforms in order to deliver an application or workload to several users. Hybrid clouds bring a number of different advantages to enterprises, such as the ease of spinning resources up and down , and the cost efficiency of being able to pay for the capacity on an hourly or monthly basis instead of being tied down to a specific billing plan. What’s even better is that it allows for the greatest flexibility when the virtualization technology vendors started offering built in support for moving live virtual machines across a network, as it allows a straightforward means of transitioning applications and workloads between sites.

Take a look on a picture below. Rackspace is building a case for the multi-site hybrid cloud. Here is the explanation provided by Rackspace:

Rackspace defines a multi-site hybrid cloud is one that involves attaching existing IT infrastructure to a public cloud provider via a private leased line or a public internet connection. The main advantage to a hybrid cloud is that it allows existing infrastructure, including legacy hardware and code that are otherwise expensive and disruptive to replace. However, this doesn’t come without a catch, as it greatly limits control over geography and may result in increased latency as distance between sites increase, not to mention includes additional time and expense meant for provisioning network connections and reliability of inter-site communication, when compared to pure cloud implementations.

I found this idea interesting. Every IT in a large organization is looking how to optimize cloud deployment without disrupting the existing IT servers rooms. Hybrid cloud can be a good solution for that. Another aspect is security. In my view, hybrid cloud can provide some advantages to IT and large companies to keep some their servers more protected.

What is my conclusion? IT is a blocker to cloud technologies in many companies these days. Even if IT understands the value of the cloud technologies, it provides too much disruption to existing IT infrastructure and future strategies. So, Rackspace is spot on. Hybrid cloud can be a potential way to mitigate a potential concerns of IT about public cloud. Note to companies looking for PLM solutions. While public cloud can provide a clear strategic advantage in terms of resource optimiaztion, Hybrid cloud can be an interesting option and intermediate steps towards exploration of cloud technologies for larger manufacaturing firms. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg