It has been few months since I published my first comparison between PLM cloud services provided by different CAD, PLM and ERP vendors. You can see my first blog about it – PLM vendors: cloud service comparison. This blog raised many comments and questions online and offline. I’ve been following it for some time trying to learn more and present an updated version of PLM cloud comparison. I wanted to share something that can help customers to make an intelligent decision about cloud PLM selection as well as to provide additional source of questions to be checked with PLM vendors during the selection process.
So, here is a new version of comparison table.
Few comments about the changes I’ve made. I decided to replace complex IaaS, PaaS, SaaS definition into something more simple – SaaS / Hosted. Multi-tenancy is an important characteristics that indicates the architecture of software platform for cloud deployment. Public vs Private cloud differentiation is pretty much straightforward. I added a column that indicates that availability of software from 3rd party hosting services. It looks like a growing trend among PLM vendors to partner with companies providing services to maintain and run cloud PLM environment for customers.
Some additional articles that can help you to make a decision. My article on Engineering.com – PLM is the best Hosted, SaaS or On Premise… Let’s sort it out. Another publication I found is very useful – All PLM Clouds are not created equal created by CIMdata and provided by Arena Solutions.
What is my conclusion? Cloud remains a complicated topic for manufacturing companies to decide about. Although the adoption of cloud PLM solution is growing, it is still hard for companies to decide about what is the right PLM cloud. A divide line is clearly Hosted vs SaaS multi-tenant environments. I think, the advantages of multi-tenant SaaS over Hosted cloud PLM solutions is not obvious for large manufacturing companies. At the same time, all cloud PLM implementations are still require “implementations” and hardly can be used out-of-the-box, which prevents easy adoption. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
