Siemens Digital Industries Software's CEO Tony Hemmelgarn recently announced during the company's media and analyst conference, MAC 2022, that Siemens has passed the $200 million mark for its Xcelerator-as-a-Service (XaaS) offering. The announcement adds to this week’s news of other PLM heavyweights bringing software suites to a SaaS model.

“We have strong momentum around XaaS,” says Hemmelgarn. “The cloud-related annual recurring revenue exceeded $200 million at the end of Q1 FY2022, and growth also continued to accelerate during the second quarter.”

“Last year, we announced our transition to a SaaS-based business and introduced Xcelerator-as-a-Service. Customers are now responding enthusiastically, ready to embrace the cloud to accelerate their digital transformations,” Hemmelgarn says. “In short, we are changing our business so that we can help our customers change their industries, which makes our portfolio easier to access, more open and integrated.”

One customer impressed by XaaS is Lockheed Martin Aeronautics. Siemens was able to demonstrate the gains that could be made with XaaS, which was one of several decisive factors for the company's choice to invest in Xcelerator as a basis for product development work.

It is also worth noting that XaaS has been expanded, with the high-end CAD program NX X. This is a packaged solution that combines the functions of Siemens NX software, centralized storage capacity and built-in collaboration delivered via industry-leading host partners. With NX X, software upgrades, backups and hardware requirements are handled by Siemens and its hosting partners, ensuring that the software is up to date and running on leading hardware.

Enthusiastic Response. “Customers are now responding enthusiastically—ready to embrace the cloud to accelerate their digital transformations—in response to the fact that last year we announced our transition to a SaaS-based business and introduced Xcelerator-as-a-Service,” said the head of Siemens Digital Industries Software, Tony Hemmelgarn, during the company's recent media and analyst conference MAC 2022.

At the conference, Hemmelgarn also highlighted how a number of companies from global industry leaders to startups use Siemens software to create and utilize what he described as, “the industry's most comprehensive digital twin” to digitally transform and manage global challenges.

The reason is that for the last few years, Siemens has been in what could be described as a technological expansion, where it has not only bought and organically added a number of capabilities to its Xcelerator portfolio—Siemens’ PLM platform—but also integrated the features into a seamless whole.

“In short, today Xcelerator is one of the market's most comprehensive and integrated portfolios of software, services and an application development platform designed to help companies create and utilize digital twins as a base,” says Hemmelgarn.

A Visualization of the Digital Thread and the Digital Twin at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics. The assignments that the company's customers perform are complex. With the continued development of advanced technology and the use of data to make predictions about complex systems, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics aims to enter a unique position to take advantage of the information over the digital thread via the Xcelerator portfolio. This is where digital twins come in. "This is not a new idea," said Richard Joseph, chief of the U.S. Air Force. "What has changed is the enormous amount of data available about the physical systems and, more importantly, the greatly increased computing power available to run digital simulations." By taking full advantage of these digital transformation opportunities and treating data as a strategic asset, the Lockheed team will drive standardization of the complex technology of digital twins to not only promote understanding of the entire product lifecycle, but also enable industry-wide interoperability. The Xcelerator portfolio will play a key role in this. The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II or Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) and its digital twin (pictured above) is a fifth-generation fighter aircraft with stealth technology.

XaaS a crucial factor for Lockheed Martin

With XaaS, the cloud version of Xcelerator, the portfolio has also become more accessible, scalable and flexible, with a subscription offering that takes advantage of cloud technology to provide powerful new features.

As an example, go back to how Siemens successfully demonstrated to Lockheed Martin Aeronautics the benefits of the cloud technology.

“In one example, we showed how cycling time reduction can be improved by not only delivering a new set of digital features to the engineer, but also the speed at which the new capabilities come into the hands of those who design, build and maintain the platform,” says Dale Tutt, spokesperson for Siemens in the Aerospace & Defense field in a previous engineering.com interview.

“XaaS plays a crucial role in enabling this type of benefit and enables capacity scaling across the enterprise or within a specific program,” Tutt says. “When we started this discussion with Lockheed, we were able to show in the cloud environment how quickly we can give them new solutions and how quickly people can speed up the new solutions. I think many companies are stuck, in that this is a paradigm that is difficult to get through, and really do not realize that in a cloud environment like XaaS we can implement solutions quickly, that they are easy to configure and that we can make the organization operational a lot faster.”

“Having experienced several of these migrations before, my personal experience is that, yes, it can be difficult. But what we did now was to show that there are other ways to do this, ways that can really help you go through these processes much faster,” he says.

Large PLM Investment. The world's fifth largest car group, South Korean Hyundai KIA Motors (HKMC) has chosen solutions from Siemens Xcelerator for next generation PLM, replaces existing solutions by switching from Dassault Systèmes CATIA (chassis, body, etc.), PTCs Windchill (PDM) and Creo (driveline CAD) to Siemens Digital Industries NX for CAD and to the Siemens PLM Suite Teamcenter on the PDM side. Hyundai KIA Motors has been working in Dassault's CATIA environment for almost 40 years, particularly on the body design side. CATIA V5 is now being replaced by Siemens Digital Industries Software's NX CAD.

From Hyundai KIA to Nemo’s Garden

But customers do not only benefit from Xaas within the A&D area. Hemmelgarn stated during MAC 2022 that worldwide companies of all sizes “use solutions from the Xcelerator portfolio to solve their business challenges and create competitive advantages.”

Global car manufacturers such as Hyundai KIA and Daimler Truck have both chosen Siemens Xcelerator as a platform when exploring carbon-neutral futures.

Moreover, at MAC 2022 Siemens also highlighted how the Italian startup Nemo's Garden and Saildrone, specialists in autonomous marine data collection, are taking advantage of the availability of Xcelerator-as-a-Service to develop underwater farming solutions by increasing their development efforts and to innovate faster.

“When I first saw Siemens’ digital twin technology, I was fascinated. Nemo’s Garden is a unique system, and we have to adapt to each environment in which it is to be installed. If you can virtually model that environment before you begin, you can anticipate the challenges and address them in the best way,” says Luca Gamberini, co-founder of Nemo’s Garden.

“We have seen benefits in understanding the flow of water around the shapes of our biospheres. We have a greater understanding of the stress points on the structure around the biospheres. We also understand how the different interactions of solar radiation, the temperature and all the physical factors act on the plants. All thanks to the digital twin's ability to replicate our system.”

For more on how PLM leaders are moving to SaaS systems, read: Will PTC’s Cloud-Based, Dual-CAD Strategy Succeed?