Remote access is an increasingly popular technology within engineering companies, according to software developer OpenText. OpenText’s remote access platform Exceed TurboX (ETX) allows engineers to remotely connect to servers running their software, rather than running the software on their local machines. If that concept sounds familiar to you, you’re not alone, according to OpenText’s Margit Koenig.

“We often get the question: Does ETX work in the cloud? And the answer I usually give is: Well, it is the cloud.”

Exceed TurboX puts an entire desktop on the cloud, bestowing the benefits of modern cloud software to traditional engineering applications.

“We are the cloud for extremely complex desktop applications that run on Linux and Windows,” explained Martin Teetz, Product Marketing Manager at OpenText. “Basically, we are not the cloud for browser-based web applications, but complex desktop applications.”

We’ve previously written about the benefits of remote access for engineers, as well as the specific workflows enabled with Exceed TurboX. In this article, we’ll take a look at how Exceed TurboX is being used in the world of engineering and manufacturing.

ETX for Mechanical Engineering

“The pure definition of manufacturing is the production of products, and it's closely connected with engineering,” explained Ines Piech, Sales Director Europe for OpenText. “We personally prefer the term mechanical engineering, because we're seeing this describes the area where ETX and remote access is used a lot better.”

There are many distinct stages in product production, from research, design, simulation and development to testing and production proper, to quality assurance and finally, to sales and marketing. According to Piech, engineering companies are using Exceed TurboX throughout many of those stages.

“In ETX we mainly focus on the areas of research, product design, development and testing,” she continued. “These are the key areas where ETX plays a role.”

ETX shines brightest when paired with the complex desktop applications typically associated with the product design workflow. These include mechanical CAD programs like CATIA, EDA programs like Virtuoso and CAE programs like ANSYS HFSS. OpenText maintains a close relationship with the software developers of many popular engineering applications to ensure a smooth experience for users.

“With the key application vendors like Cadence and Siemens Mentor and others, we have a technical alliance partnership,” Piech said. “So, whenever there’s a new version of the product, we make sure they get the trial version so they can test it on their side and vice versa. We want to make sure that our latest version works with their latest version.”

Many engineering companies have developed internal design tools, all of which are also compatible with Exceed TurboX. According to Teetz, it’s extremely rare for there to be any issues with custom tools. Much more common is that internal tools could benefit from optimization for ETX—and OpenText is ready to step in and help.

“We don't get the question ‘the application doesn't run,’ but we do get questions such as ‘the remote display of the application isn’t responsive enough’. OpenText Solution Consultants can always jump in and optimize settings and infrastructure architecture,” Teetz commented.

“The expertise our people bring in is to let the customers know how to size their hardware, how to size their network,” Koenig added. “Would additional graphic cards help to really speed up the application? So, it's configurational questions we have. And with all the experience we have in certain areas, we deliver a lot of add-on quality here.”

ETX Case Study: Semiconductor Design

There are many examples of big engineering companies using Exceed TurboX; due to the competitiveness of the industry, many of them can’t be named. One such example is a company that develops and manufactures electronic chips for the automotive industry. This company, among the top ten semiconductor companies in the world, uses Exceed TurboX to consolidate its datacenters and increase access to its engineering data.

“They used to have many, many developer sites worldwide and many, many data centers,” Koenig said. “They had the problem that one team for one product had to be on one side to exchange information. The worldwide data and application were never reachable for all engineers. Plus, the data exchange between development and the actual fabs was also very difficult.”

The company began using ETX’s predecessor, Exceed onDemand, about ten years ago, and has since begun rolling out Exceed TurboX. OpenText expects that ETX will be implemented as standard across the company in just a few months.

“They decided to set up a centralized data center where all the high-end applications are housed, all the data is stored, and where they build infrastructure reachable by everybody in the world,” Koenig explained. “And this gave them the advantage that, when they did the setup for a certain product, they were not restricted to a site. They could take expertise from all over the world and build virtual teams. They could change their teams whenever needed. So, if they needed more personnel on one project, they just looked worldwide to see where they had the availability.”

Koenig continued: “A second advantage is that, within the semiconductor industries, companies are sold and carved out daily. So, they buy companies and do the onboarding for a new development team. This is much easier if data is centralized than if you need to add on more and more data centers.”

The semiconductor company relies on a wide variety of popular engineering applications to complete the design, simulation and testing of its products. These applications can all be remotely accessed through ETX. “We serve in total about 150 different applications with the same remote access tool,” Koenig said.

ETX Case Study: Artificial Intelligence

Another company that’s embraced ETX is one of the largest automotive suppliers in the world. In particular, this company is turning increasingly to high performance computing (HPC) to develop sensors for autonomous driving. Designing these artificial intelligence products requires an enormous amount of computing power—a need which is met with remote access software like ETX.

“The only chance to fulfill that need is to build up enormous server farms and computer power in a centralized way, and then let the worldwide development communities work on those high performance computing farms,” Koenig said. “It's not possible to set up infrastructure at, say, twenty data centers worldwide. It has to be one or two. And again, the question is: How do developers get access to those applications? And the answer, again, is ETX.”

The automotive supplier uses ETX to access its centralized computing farm for artificial intelligence applications. The remote access solution is critical not only to unlock the power of HPC, but to allow the company to keep up in an extremely competitive industry.

“The car industry is under a lot of technology pressure to bring the technologies in not five years from now, but within the next couple of months,” Koenig added.

Engineering in the Cloud

Engineers rely on sophisticated desktop applications to perform their work, but it’s not necessary that these applications run from the engineer’s desktop. In fact, there are many benefits of offloading these applications to the cloud, and OpenText Exceed TurboX can provide them. As we’ve seen, many large engineering companies are recognizing these benefits and using ETX to obtain them.

If you’re interested in learning more about Exceed TurboX or remote access, visit the OpenText website where you can download a free trial of ETX or view a live demo.