PLM vendors, large manufacturers and public cloud

Companies are moving to cloud these days. The question vendors and customers are asking today is how do we move to the cloud. I’ve been asking this question in my post few month ago – PLM / PDM: Why the cloud? Wrong question… I discovered multiple options for customers to start their move to the cloud – mainstream cloud productivity tools to share data and collaborate, to migrate existing PLM platforms to cloud using IaaS strategies as well as to build new type of platforms and tools using new type of cloud platforms and infrastructure.

Today, I want to show the perspective on public cloud from both sides – large provider of public cloud infrastructure (Google) and large manufacturing company (GE) and to see what is the intersection between their strategies.

Google – example of public cloud platform

My attention caught Google presentation – The next generation of Cloud. Navigate your browser to the following link to watch it. Besides the fact it was inspiring by the exact same question – “How to you move to the cloud”, it provided a very interesting insight on the aspect of Google public cloud platform.

Hardware cost is declining and Google is adjusting public cloud to match economic realities. Together with economic of scale and utilization, I can see a trajectory towards decreased of public cloud cost even more in the future. 

Large manufacturers move to the cloud

So, what customers are thinking about public cloud? Inforworld article just published an article presenting GE strategy to go all-in with public cloud. Presented as an interview with GE COO Chris Drumgoole, article outlines his aggressive plans to migrate to public cloud services — and how they support GE’s organizational goals. Read the article and draw your opinion. Here is my favorite passage:

Drumgoole won’t talk specific numbers, but he claims that “north of 90 percent” of the apps deployed by GE this year have been in a public cloud environment. We’re big fans of the idea that everything ends up in the public cloud utility model eventually. “Eventually” is the big caveat, because some people within GE would argue that should be tomorrow, while others would tell you it’s 15 years from now. It’s a subject of good debate. But either way, the regulatory environment we live in right now prohibits it. In a lot of spaces, when we say technically that we think something should be public, and we’re comfortable with it being public, the regulatory environment and the regulators aren’t quite there yet and we end up having to do some sort of private or hybrid cloud. That’s probably one of the biggest barriers to us moving more public.

Drumgoole speaks about connected devices, big data and analytics as a significant driver to move data to the cloud. I reminded me one of my previous posts – IoT data will blow up traditional PLM databases (https://beyondplm.com/2014/09/23/iot-data-will-blow-up-traditional-plm-databases/). The amount of data is huge and it will certainly require new approach in data management. Here is the example of how much data produced by jet engine these days:

Take one of the jet engines we make, and if it’s fully instrumented. On a typical flight, it’s going to generate about two terabytes of data. Not everybody fully instruments them, but if you instrument it the way people would like in order to get predictive data, you’re talking about 500GB per engine per flight. A flight with a GE engine takes off or lands every three seconds. All of a sudden, the data gets very, very large very, very fast.

PLM vendors and public cloud

As for today, I’m not aware about any PDM/PLM software using Google Cloud as a platform. The majority of cloud PLM software built on top of infrastructure provided by collocated hosting services and variety of Amazon cloud infrastructure. Dassault Systems and Siemens PLM made few public statements about support of diverse set of cloud options and IaaS infrastructure. It would be interesting to see future evolution of PLM cloud platforms.

What is my conclusion? The technology and economic of cloud is changing  these days. My hunch, it will pull more vendors and companies to use public cloud in the next few years. Software companies will try to balance between leveraging technological platforms and cost. At the same time, customers will try to balance between regulatory requirements and opportunities to make data accessible and scale without limits. Interesting time and significant opportunity. Just my thoughts..

Best, Oleg