A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Multi-Cloud PLM?

Multi-Cloud PLM?
Oleg
Oleg
13 January, 2021 | 3 min for reading

In one of my last blogs last year, I talked about the evolution of PLM system architecture. I’ve got many questions offline and online asking me about specific aspects of architecture, vendors, and approaches. While cloud seems to be inevitable, the question about cloud adoption, cloud architecture, and how it will be supported by vendors raise most of the questions.

I attended the PDT 2020 conference a couple of months ago. The slide that caught my attention was presented by Marc Halpern of Gartner. I think credit for the “single vendor black hole” name goes to him.

Vendors for a very long time were pitching the idea of a single platform (vendor) selection as the most efficient and providing answers to all questions about integrations. I believe, companies are gravitating in between these two extremes and trying to set the right balance. This raises many questions about PLM integrations (this is a separate topic, I hope to talk about it later in my blog).

Cloud technologies have passed the point of technical viability.  Cloud solutions are expanding and it is an inevitable future. In such a context, one of the most interesting questions is about multi-cloud. It is certain that these technologies are the future and I can see rapid adoption of cloud applications and platforms. As a result, the reality of the companies is to operate using more than one cloud application. Specifically for PLM, it brings a question of how manufacturing businesses connected into a supply chain and other types of relationships will operate using multiple cloud solutions (potentially from different vendors).  Multi-cloud solutions become in high demand as well as openness of existing platforms.

What technologies and architectures can support multi-cloud integrations and how it might all work together? In the past, PLM applications run on top of SQL databases and such a database was an obvious integration point. SQL-injecting, direct access to data was a universal solution to solve most PLM integration problems. Even the situation with PLM openness has significantly improved for the last decade, still it is a big challenge.

Microservices is the right way to think about modern architecture and integrations. Such architecture and the rise of Kubernetes as the cloud OS allowed modern applications to be distributed and optimized. Microservices architecture enabled the replacing of on-premise servers by virtual machines, applications now are converting into globally distributed and logically centralized. Most importantly integrated and connected. Such services can be integrated in a much easier way and stop being dependent on the old school direct database hacking.

What is my conclusion?

The industry is gravitating towards multi-cloud applications with the architecture moving from legacy on-premise servers towards global and distributed applications. Such architecture allows much higher levels of granularity and integrations, which by itself will become a way to escape a black hole of a single vendor. 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 networksMy opinion can be unintentionally biased.

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
10 March, 2017

Digital transformation is a new trend and manufacturing companies are exploring how to become leaders in a new digital society...

4 December, 2009

My new post on 3D Perspectives: Best, Oleg

25 October, 2018

Earlier today, Arena PLM shared the news about acquisition of Omnify Software. Omnify Software mentioned on thier twitter account – we...

26 January, 2014

Differentiation. Competitive advantage. Value sales. I’m sure you’ve heard these buzzwords many times. Competition is part of everyday business life....

19 May, 2014

In the beginning was CAD and CAD was the only important system for engineers. Then came PDM… In my view,...

24 May, 2019

PLM companies are full speed ahead in digital transformation. Every vendor is advertising how their technologies will be significantly improved...

26 July, 2020

For those of your long time with PLM and Enterprise Software, I bet you’ve heard about TLA, which stands for...

27 October, 2016

Things are changing in the manufacturing world. A decade ago, the biggest concern for manufacturing companies was how to manufacture...

30 May, 2019

Remember a few years ago, we had many discussions about PLM cloud. This is just one example of my article...

Blogroll

To the top