For the last decade, consumer technologies created many new surprises and challenges for enterprise software. Consumer technology is creating disruptive advantages enterprises are simply required to face more quickly to stay relevant in the market. But the move towards new technologies isn’t simple.
ZDNet article – The enterprise technologies to watch in 2016 by Dion Hinchcliffee, brings you a big portion of new technologies. Take a look for more information here to maintain your buzzwords compliancy level.
The following picture is nice classification separating technologies into tactical, strategic, incremental and disruptive.
The separation between “in or entering mainstream” and “still emerging” is very interesting. Manufacturing companies are always slow to adopt new technologies. So, if technology is still emerging such as Internet of Things, it can tell a lot about speed of adoption and return of investment for new technological firms.
The one, which caught my special attention was “public cloud”. It was mentioned as a technology entering mainstream. Future passage can give you a bit more information.
Public cloud. Few enterprises have shifted entirely to public cloud yet, but that increasingly appears to be the ultimate end state when looked at over a timescale longer than 18-36 months. While private and hybrid cloud are considered ‘starter cloud’ models for most organizations, recent data show that public cloud will ultimately dominate. While still having the smallest level of adoption compared to private and hybrid, public cloud has a highest rate of growth, at a ferocious average annual compound annual rate of 44% through 2019. Public cloud will now overtake private cloud in usage between 2017 and 2018.
So, private and hybrids are considered as “starter cloud” solution. It says a lot if you think about what happened with cloud PLM for the last few years. For most of PLM vendors cloud is still a “trial thing”. Most of vendors are still considering cloud as a delivery option in their product portfolio. So, you can choose how to deliver PLM products – on premise, on private or public clouds.
Although, there is nothing wrong with the delivery options approach, it struck me to think that such approach can play a negative role against some advantages of technologies available on public clouds only. Ultimately, cloud is about two things – economy of scale in computing and data sharing. Existing PLM technologies adapted for both private and public clouds can potentially suck to leverage scale and utilization when delivered on services like Amazon and Azure. It might be okay during the exploration stage, but can beat hard when vendors will try to scale it up and compete for cost of services.
What is my conclusion? Public cloud is one of the technologies to watch in 2016 and beyond. It can bring significant advantage to deliver PLM solution with the level of scale, cost and ability of share data seamlessly that not possible for existing technologies adapted to run on “all clouds”. PLM vendors might not feel it for the moment – most of cloud PLM products are still in the exploratory phase. But as manufacturing companies will be moving forward to adopt more cloud PLM services, new tech developed exclusively for public cloud can provide significant technological advantage. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
Want to learn more about PLM? Check out my new PLM Book website.
Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of openBoM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups and supply chain.
