Cloud is not a “new black” in PLM industry these days. It is hard to find vendor that not associating itself with “sort of cloud solution”. However, here are new a trend on horizon – bring your own cloud. Dropbox, a very successful in all means these days is trying hard to get in the enterprise business. Which made it very interesting from the standpoint of engineering and manufacturing business. Especially for companies focusing on design disciplines.
I was reading Dropbox is getting down in the business on ReadWrite.com. In a nutshell, the problem Dropbox is trying to solve is related to accounts and identity management. Navigate here and you will see how Dropbox is preparing to solve the problem of multiple accounts and security. The message is clear – for whatever it worth, you will be able to get a “piece of your cloud” secured for you and for your company if you need it. Dropbox claims full redesign of security system. Here is the passage:
“We didn’t just re-do Dropbox for Business,” Houston said. “We re-did the [whole] foundation of Dropbox.” The company redesigned the service across the desktop, mobile and the Web. The changes also include advanced security and access controls, which should help mollify company IT managers. Businesses can, among other things, manage (or block) sharing to outside users, prevent sensitive docs from going into personal accounts, monitor all activity around work files, and even remotely wipe files from the devices of former employees.
Another piece of news also came few days ago from Amazon. Navigate to the following TechCrunch article and read Amazon Launches WorkSpaces, A Virtual Desktop Service On AWS. Amazon workspaces will allow you to have virtual working space from the cloud for less cost. Here is the quote from the article:
The news plays into the company’s effort to take more business from enterprise providers by providing customer-centric services with security that is sufficient for companies with significant operations at a lesser cost.
You can ask me how these two news related to PDM. Here is the deal. In my view, CAD will be the last engineering system that will migrate to the cloud. Hardi Meybaum and I had an interesting discussion about it in one of GrabCAD blog posts here and my post here. Solutions provided by Amazon and Dropbox made me think about about a possibility to make current desktop CAD system “cloud-enabled” without even changing their desktop nature or significant re-write. Of course, all these solutions won’t stop (and don’t need to stop) future cloud design product development. However, the combination of secured cloud solution together with some virtualization technologies can make cloud based collaboration possible today (not tomorrow).
What is my conclusion? Nowadays, we can see concurrent development of different technologies related to cloud – virtualization, file sharing and others. All together, combined with existing engineering and design software they can be used to build future cloud collaborative platforms. Product Data Management (PDM) can leverage these platforms in order to build secured, cost-effective and simple solution to manage files and have collaborative access to them. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
