Need for speed and cloud CAD/PLM adoption in 2018

Cloud adoption is coming to the edge. Earlier today, I’ve learned few interesting facts about cloud adoption from Forbes article – State Of Enterprise Cloud Computing, 2018:

(1) 77% of enterprises have at least one application or a portion of their enterprise computing infrastructure in the cloud; (2) Enterprises predict they’ll invest on average $3.5M on cloud apps, platforms, and services this year; (3) More technology-dependent industries including manufacturing, high-tech, and telecom are being led by executive management to become 100% cloud.

Here is a picture I captured, shows great progress of enterprise organizations towards the cloud.

But, my favorite slide is the following one. It shows actually why companies are adopting cloud applications or in a different words, what value proposition companies are expecting from cloud apps:

You can see among the top are speed of IT delivery, business continuity and flexibility. It is also interesting to see that fast ROI, saving on CAPEX and need for real time information are not on the top list.

The result of the study made me think back about discussions related to cloud CAD and PLM adoption. You might think about IT deliver as a value of PLM services and CAD, but to be honest I don’t think for large manufacturing companies, IT delivery is a main factor in the decision to switch from on premise solutions to cloud options. PLM implementation and organizational change management are still two major factors and heavy lifting each organization need to accomplish to adopt PLM. I doubt cloud can help.

At the same time, the situation is different when it comes to small organizations and networks of contractors and suppliers. PLM delivery is a problem for resource constraint organization. For the same organizations, to support business continuity, to react fast on changing business requirements are also very much relevant problems to solve. Cloud tech can help.

The situation is also very interesting for CAD systems. Biggest value proposition of cloud CAD systems are coming from the side of data management, data sharing, communication and collaboration. Companies are hiring engineers in different places, need to communicate with production sites and customers across the globe. This is a part cloud CAD functionality that can help to feed the need for speed and business continuity.

What is my conclusion? While cloud adoption is growin, engineers are still sitting on a fence not deciding if they need to replace their existing desktop and on premise solutions with cloud alternatives. CAD and PLM companies need to stay focused on business value proposition, pain points and eco-system of applications. Cloud for the sake of the cloud might be not a good option. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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