CONTACT Software PLM and cloud re-tooling

I spent last 3 days attending CONTACT Open World. If you missed my earlier posts, take a look here and here. I wanted to share some of slides I captured from product strategy & roadmap presentation done by Frank-Patz Brockman about CONTACT Element for PLM and IoT.

In my earlier blogs and presentations, I outlined the logical steps in cloud evolution for PLM. It is a move from company servers to cloud servers and then to multi-tenant cloud PLM SaaS applications.

Few slides that caught my special attention were related to CONTACT Element cloud development and web technologies. CONTACT Element is following the path outlined above by taking existing software architecture and enabling it with cloud hosted environment based on major IaaS providers – Amazon and Microsoft. In addition to that, CONTACT Software seems to be partnering with T-System for “German cloud”. And you can see a strong “hint” that SaaS version is coming as well.

At the same time, CONTACT must re-tool their architecture to be more “web” and “cloud” oriented. You can see it in the presentation about REST and browser technologies.

What is my conclusion? When it comes to new automobiles, we traditionally look at Germany automotive companies. However, I usually observe a very conservative approach from IT organizations in Germany and their neighbors in Europe. Especially it was related to their progress in cloud adoption and development.  CONTACT Software cloud retooling is a confirmation about next step in PLM cloud adoption. All companies are accepting “cloud server deployment” and use multiple cloud infrastructure providers for public and private cloud. The next development step in cloud will be to move from hosted cloud to multi-tenant cloud applications. It will open new opportunity to change PLM value proposition for companies by switching paradigm from  data control to data intelligence. PLM digital transformation is in a full swing. 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. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.