The news from last week – Dassault Systemes, one of the leading PLM vendors is acquiring NuoDB. The formal press release can give some idea about the acquisition. The focus of NuoDB acquisition is to focus on 3DX cloud strategy, leverage NuoDB distributed elastic database for cloud and strengthens NuoDB’s ability to serve large SaaS deployments. According to Florence Hu-Aubigny, Dassault Executive VP of R&D,
“One of the objectives with the 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud is to deliver the most scalable and resilient infrastructure for the industries and clients we serve worldwide. We began our partnership with NuoDB in 2013 and are extending it today, further underscoring NuoDB’s unique distributed SQL capabilities, well adapted for native cloud environments.”
The acquisition of NeoDB came as no surprise. The core problem is that traditional SQL architectures are too expensive and won’t scale for cloud and SaaS environments.
If you remember, back a few years ago my article – what technology is behind 3DEXPEREINCE cloud? you can see how DS was focusing on finding a way to scale existing SQL backends for their platform. Here is my conclusion from my earlier article:
Dassault Systemes data management technology is coming from the acquisition of MatrixOne back in 2006 and the MatrixOne platform was developed in the 1990s. It was the core stack behind V6 and later 3DX. My hunch, Dassault Systemes is working on how to overcome the limitations of MatrixOne technology in the realization of 3DEXPERIENCE as a cloud service. According to the NuoDB article, the cost to scale traditional relational database technology can be high. This is probably the core focus of Dassault Systemes’ investment into NuoDB.
So, what is NuoDB and how does it solve the problem of SQL scale-up for 3DEXPERIENCE? The following slides were taken from an earlier NuoDB presentation that can give you some ideas. The NuoDB opportunity was to modernize the transition to cloud applications.
NuoDB marketing comparison presents the technology as a best of both worlds – NoSQL scale-out and compatibility with ANSI SQL and ease of migration for existing SQL applications.
The following slide is the key as it explains the idea in a nutshell.
While it was clear to me that DS should search for the technology to scale out 3DX/MatrixOne foundation, the acquisition demonstrates that DS is probably considering NuoDB technology as one of the elements of the infrastructure for the 3DX SaaS platform. It is not clear for the moment if the current 3DX platform runs on NuoDB, I’d expect large amounts of experiments done by DS to combine MatrixOne transaction kernel with NuoDB technology. Check out some public information about NuoDB running in Docker containers (). It would be interesting to see when and how DS will introduce NuoDB as part of the 3DX stack.
What is my conclusion?
The PLM industry is moving to SaaS and it brings many interesting questions about data management and technologies behind future PLM platforms capable of scale to multi-tenant SaaS. The problem is not fully acknowledged by mindshare (3+1) PLM vendors. It is interesting to see multiple paths vendors are following. PTC acquired Onshape and now focusing on PTC Atlas. Still not clear how Atlas will bring Creo and Windchill under its roof. Siemens PLM is probably very early at the stage of introducing TCX applications as a SaaS solution on the existing TC platform. DS seems to be making a push forward with the technology based on NuoDB or at least looking at how to scale-out 3DX foundation using this technology. I will be learning more and bringing up a separate blog with database options for SaaS PLM. Stay tuned. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM developing a digital network-based platform that manages product data and connects manufacturers and their supply chain networks. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.
