Teamcenter vs Teamcenter X Comparison

I’m learning more about Teamcenter X. If you missed my previous article, please check it out here – What did I learn about Teamcenter X. What I discovered is that Teamcenter X is a cloud version of Teamcenter hosted by Siemens and sold for “fixed price”. That seems to be a very broad and bold statement, so I wanted to get more details.

I captured the slide comparing Teamcenter vs Teamcenter X. Check this out below. In the commentary published by Al Dean of Develop3D, I learned that Teamcenter X is for the companies that cannot afford regular Teamcenter.

PLM system of choice to the global multi-national, Teamcenter has along been deployed on private cloud infrastructures at some of the largest, more complex organizations in the manufacturing industry. But what about those companies that have a requirement for a PLM system capable of handling their product complexity and complexity of the organisation, but which do not have the infrastructure or indeed budget to build their own private cloud?

Check out this picture.

Looking at the picture gives me some strange feelings about TC vs TCX comparison. Look at this by yourself. It is the same Teamcenter (all functions are included). It is hosted and operated by Siemens and it has a “SaaS” purchasing option, which is I guess a subscription with the fixed cost.

it both provide “microservices”, which is by itself very unclear. I can see Microservices is a new architecture developed to support Teamcenter X (compared to decades-old Teamcenter). In such a case, we should see “old vs new” comparison. If the same Microservices are for both, then there is something I’m missing. The containers tech is clear. To support it is really important if you need to have any type of software to run in modern computing infrastructure. At the same time, it is not clear what is cloud services and why it is not relevant for Teamcenter while both have microservice architecture? I hope to clarify these and some other issues soon. Stay tuned.

What is my conclusion?

Based on the comparison provided by Siemens, Teamcenter X looks like the same software adopted SaaS environment. It gives you the same features and functions but hosted, maintained, upgraded, and supported by Siemens. It has some cloudy or SaaS-y features, but it is not clear what is the point of them (eg. cloud services) if it serves the same functions. Just my thoughts…

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.