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
11 June, 2011

Integration between design and manufacturing is one of the topics that normally hits a lot of discussion in the product...

7 July, 2009

I was reading Oracle Web Center announcement few days ago. Browsing top down on Oracle web site, I found it...

30 April, 2009

The latest development in Product Lifecycle Management has raised the level of PLM systems with their ability to support wider...

28 April, 2015

The last decade changed  many things in our everyday life. It is hard to imagine, but just think about few...

30 July, 2014

Security. It is hard to underestimate the importance of the topic. Information is one of the biggest assets companies have....

17 August, 2015

Last year, my attention was caught by CIMdata article – IBM Forms New Watson Group to Meet Growing Demand for...

15 May, 2019

A few days ago, I shared my thoughts about Manufacturing Marketplaces and trends beyond generative design. If you missed my...

8 April, 2010

I’d like to come with questions about the topic of PLM and Data Modeling. The idea of this discussion came...

20 July, 2009

Short prompt – I’m looking on definition of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Product Information Management (PIM). Product lifecycle management...

Blogroll

To the top