Amazon is an absolutely marketshare leader in cloud computing. Because “cloud” is such a big and vague word these days, we must clarify and say “public cloud”. So, you may think for most of us, cloud is equal to Amazon. AWS EC2 allows us to spin new servers quickly and provide great services to everybody interested in development of SaaS packages.
Not so fast… Questions are coming too. I can see two major ones – cost and strategy. I’ve been posted Cloud PLM and battle for cost recently. Amazon public cloud is coming with challenging cost sticker to some of us. Strategy question is connected to many factors – PLM PaaS opportunity, security and storage alternatives. Finally, with huge respect to Amazon, I’m not sure how many CAD / PLM companies are interested in catholic marriage between cloud PLM platforms and AWS. To provide PLM solution independent from Amazon IaaS and to control data storage is an interesting option for many vendors and partners. How to do so? I think, this is part of strategy for every PLM vendor these days looking how to develop long term relationships with manufacturing OEMs and suppliers.
My attention caught Gigaom article – Want to beat Amazon in the cloud? Here are 5 tips. Read the article. It provides some interesting opportunities how to compete AWS. It raises the point that in 2014 AWS became an elastic service commodity competing on cost. This is an interesting quote explaining that –
But fast-forward to 2014: there are dozens of IaaS providers offering similar capabilities. The selling points — like self-service, zero CAPEX and elasticity — that once made the cloud look exciting are not as appealing anymore, and they are no longer the differentiating factors. In the current context, selling cloud for its self-service capabilities is similar to Microsoft trying to sell the latest version of Windows only for its graphical interface.
Cost is important. However, for enterprise, value is often even more important. Therefore, speaking from the perspective of PLM players, my favorite passage is related to how to support scale-up and shared storage:
AWS’s philosophy of throwing more VMs at an application is not ideal in many scenarios. It might work wonders for marketing websites and gaming applications but not for enterprise workloads. Not every customer use case is designed to run on a fleet of servers in a scale-out mode. Provide a mechanism to add additional cores to the CPU, more RAM and storage to the VM involving minimal downtime. The other feature that’s been on the wish list of AWS customers for a long time is shared storage. It’s painful to setup a DB cluster with automatic failover without shared storage.
Here is my point. I think, CAD and PLM vendors will have to discover how to provide a balanced and scalable cloud platform. This platform will have to answer on questions how to scale from the solution for small manufacturers and mid-size companies to enterprise OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers. The border between these segments is vague. It is hard to develop two distinct PLM offerings and support two separate platforms. It was hard in the past on premise software and it is even more complicated on the cloud.
What is my conclusion? PLM providers will have to discover how to grow up from AWS-based offering and develop scalable cloud PLM platforms. It must include diverse options for data storage as well as computing power. So, to beat Amazon can be not such a dream option for PLM vendors like it looks from the beginning. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
