A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Cloud PLM and Battle for Cost?

Cloud PLM and Battle for Cost?
Oleg
Oleg
31 January, 2014 | 2 min for reading

plm-cloud-cost-battle

PLM companies are switching to the cloud. Software vendors are taking different paths and technical strategies – IaaS, PaaS, private clouds, public clouds with high diversity of options and marketing messages. Navigate to some of my previous posts to get up to speed with the topic – Cloud PLM and IaaS Options, PLM PaaS, PLM cloud strategies.

Public cloud and specifically Amazon Web Services is one of the options to explore the potential of new PLM technologies, delivery and business models. To use elastic infrastructure provided by Amazon is compelling to newcomers in PLM industry as well as for established PLM vendors transforming their PLM portfolios.  A potential disadvantage of Amazon is that it can get a little pricey. Many cloud companies discovered “cost issue” especially when they come to the point of scaling customers and data.

Earlier this week, I was reading an interesting article by Heap – “How We Estimated Our AWS Costs Before Shipping Any Code”. Heap is an iOS and Web analytics tool that captures every user interaction. Interesting enough, Heap helps you to estimate their AWS cost to decide if product / project/ website has a sustainable business model. Here are few interesting examples provided by Heap article:

Cost reduction: CPU. Our queries involve a large amount of string processing and data decompression. Much to our surprise, this caused our queries to become CPU-bound. Instead of spending more money on RAM, we could achieve equivalent performance with SSDs (which are far cheaper). Though we also needed to shift our costs towards more CPU cores, the net effect was favorable.

Cost inflation: Data Redundancy. This is a necessary feature of any fault-tolerant, highly-available cluster. Each live data point needs to be duplicated, which increases costs across the board by 2x.

This article made me think about possible trajectories of cloud PLM options. PLM vendors thinking about transforming and adapting their existing PLM products for cloud must be aggressively making assessments about their cloud cost on Amazon or alternative platforms. Startup companies developing new generation of PLM products have a very good opportunity to check their costs and viability of their future business models.

What is my conclusion? The battle about cloud viability has strong cost relation. Software companies are moving from “CD shipments” to “service providing”. This process will be painful for many of them and sooner they validate and build their future business models is better. For PLM companies, the best association should be “cost model for manufacturing” – the earlier in the process of product design you can see the cost – the better chance this product become successful. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
23 July, 2013

Touch interface is changing the way we work and think. You can see it everywhere these days. Engineers are not...

30 December, 2018

End of the year is a time to look into a crystal ball and say what is going to happen....

27 February, 2018

The last article inspired by presentations and discussions at PI PLMx last week is about integration and collaboration. That was...

23 April, 2015

I assume you are aware about Onshape, the new CAD software outfit founded by Jon Hirschtick and part of his...

16 October, 2019

It has been seven years since Autodesk introduced Fusion 360. I checked my old blog – What Fusion 360 means...

26 July, 2016

Almost a decade years ago, I’ve been using HTC phone running Windows mobile operational system. The same one you see...

6 July, 2010

Product-related data is one of the most important aspects of any PLM implementation. When you talk about PLM implementation, the...

28 August, 2009

Thinking more about PLM implementation during last few days, I’d like to come and discuss few aspects of PLM implementation...

6 October, 2009

What I want to discuss today is PLM Best Practices. Frankly saying, my thoughts about the topic were accelerated by...

Blogroll

To the top