Teamcenter X, which was recently announced at a SiemensMedia and Analyst 2020 event, will put the company’s PLM platform on the cloud and aims to provide the “future-readiness” Siemens feels will meet today’s needs with:
- A pay-as-you-use model that provides flexibility to scale based on user onboarding/offboarding needs
- Flexibility in terms of adopting digital twin capability and functional scalability, as well as adopting “preconfigured engineering and business solutions”
- Swift enablement, with a low cost of entry that leverages cloud-hosted infrastructure as a service, as well as perfect timing to align with the post-COVID-19 “new normal” requirements for flexibility and global scalability of companies of all sizes and in all industries
As Siemens puts it on the company website: “Teamcenter X is built using new industrial components from our Mendix low-code platform, allowing customers to leverage cloud native micro-services and stand up new apps quickly. It’s a true SaaS solution, it’s future-ready, and it uses the latest technology like artificial intelligence and machine learning to help customers work smarter.”
This is definitely a step forward in the right direction to build a fully scalable and flexible “PLM of the future” (as Siemens proclaims). It would be interesting to understand the level of modularity that Teamcenter X will offer in terms of being a true software-as-a-service platform—and more so in the context of the wider Xcelerator portfolio.
Typical SaaS benefits include affordable applications that can be accessed quickly even for occasional usage, are easy to scale, allow web and mobile access, and are powered with managed maintenance, upgrades, configuration and integration.
Key considerations for adopting “PLM-as-a-service” also include the level of:
- Capabilities available on premise vs what is cloud based
- Interoperability and integration with existing apps, both within and outside the Siemens portfolio; this includes integration with future-ready cloud-based CAD solutions—with CAD often being the most important of the applications
- Effort required to transition/migrate data and existing processes from older on-premise versions of Teamcenter, as well as from competing non-Siemens solutions
- Integration and customization; integration and data migration are often perceived as the Achilles’ heel of PLM deployments
- Support and service level agreements (SLAs), especially for potential shared platform usage
- Vendor “lock-in” and the ability to transition to and from PLM hosted solutions
The above considerations apply universally to any SaaS solutions, and will certainly be key questions to answer when adopting such platforms. This update from Siemens is timely as it comes only a few days after the LiveWorx online event, during which PTC announced its new SaaS platform, Atlas.
The new Teamcenter X capabilities will be something to watch out for at the upcoming virtual Realize LIVE online conference from Siemens, which is scheduled June 23-24.