Integration is holding back PLM cloud adoption

Cloud PLM adoption is growing. More PLM vendors these days are re-branding and re-building  product and software architecture to keep up with fast moving cloud trend. This year I can see significant shift towards discussion about technical aspects of cloud implementation. The devils is in details and differentiate between variety of cloud implementation options is very important.

However, regardless on technological options, what do you think holding back all cloud implementations. In the past, the topic of security was one of the most debated among engineering software professionals and customers. Security is important. But what else

Forbes article Cloud Computing Adoption Continues Accelerating In The Enterprise speaks about different aspects of cloud business. I highly recommend you to read it -I’m sure you can find many interesting data points. My attention caught the following chart presenting top disconnects holding SaaS applications adoption:

The three biggest disconnects holding cloud-based infrastructure and applications back from greater adoption from an IT senior management perspective include concerns about the security (61%), integration challenges (46%) and information governance (35%).  IT leaders perceive that line-of-business (LOB) leaders are most concerned about security (52%), difficulty measuring Return on Investment (ROI) and determining the accurate economic value of cloud solutions (37%) and a tie between information governance and cloud-based applications being able to meet enterprise and/or industry standards (32%).

Security is an obvious suspect. What was very interesting is to find Integration, standards and information governance as #2 and #3. As I posted few weeks ago, integration is one of the major challenges that influence broad PLM adoption and ROI. It looks like cloud applications adoption is even more dependent on the ability to integrate multiple SaaS and on premise applications.

What is my conclusion? Cloud adoption is growing. However, enterprise software landscape is complicated. Integration was always a challenge. However, cloud applications are bringing new type of challenges. PLM is data intensive with a lot of dependencies of data distributed between departments, databases and external companies-suppliers. New cloud technologies can make integration easier by leveraging modern web technologies. However, absence of standard and large amount of legacy software makes it really complex. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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