From PLM rehosting to multi-tenant SaaS

I learned new cloud PLM buzzword – rehosting (re-hosting). It came from CIMdata blog about PTC cloud strategy earlier this week. Navigate here to read more. Stan Przybylinski of CIMdata is talking to Kevin Wrenn (GM of PLM at PTC). Here is what I captured:

We also use AWS for re-hosting the on-premise instances of our customers. When customers ask about cloud, our standard response is AWS. They can offer infrastructure that PTC could never approach, and unparalleled security and availability. AWS also gets more cost effective year over year.

Rehosting isn’t entirely new and enterprise companies are using it very intensively. Here are few examples of re-hosting definition from Wikipedia – Software modernization.

Re-hosting: Running the legacy applications, with no major changes, on a different platform. This is often used as an intermediate step to eliminate legacy and expensive hardware. Most common examples include mainframe applications being rehosted on UNIX or Wintel platform.

Few more examples of rehosting from Oracle here and IBM redbooks here.

…rehosting is a way to preserve the expensive investments in business logic and business data trapped in proprietary hardware and software, while opening paths to future modernization by moving to an open and more extensible architecture.

Remember my blog last year – What PLM strategists can learn from PLM and ERP “True Cloud” debates? Internet and cloud software created an opportunity for once-in-a-generation shift from corporate data centers and enterprise IT to multi-tenant cloud applications and elastic computing paradigms. The transformation is not simple and it creates potential collisions between enterprise software vendors, IT departments and new software providers. Inertia and existing business relationships are creating advantages to established enterprise software providers. Internet, agility and low cost are creating an opportunity for new vendors. All together it set up a once-in-a-generation battle.

The following picture shows you an evolution of PLM for networks into multi-tenant PLM solutions and platforms.

What is my conclusion? PLM industry is moving into 2nd stage of cloud development – On demand / IaaS and virtualization. The next logic step for PLM vendors is to re-host existing products. This is an intermediate station on the path to future SaaS PLM cloud. By rehosting, PLM vendors will  reduce burden of expensive and complicated IT as well as will take leverage of new business model (subscriptions). The next “station” will be to introduce sharable mutli-tenant PLM SaaS platforms. These applications will leverage cloud scale by using new technology and offering new functional capabilities that cannot be realized in hosted solutions. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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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. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.