Inspiration for this post:
Siemens PLM has announced that Teamcenter is now available on the cloud. This new platform option gives customers a faster and more economical route for Teamcenter deployment within their organization. Traditional Deployment concerns regarding issues such as hardware, database configuration, and ancillary deployment issues fall away. Deployment of Teamcenter on the cloud is essentially reduced to selecting a cloud platform, populating your data, and training the users.
This news warms the heart of my inner PLM geek.
The first hints of Teamcenter on the cloud go back to April 2009 when Siemens PLM initially announced Teamcenter Mobility for the iPad. It allows customers to attach users to their internal Teamcenter database via a 4-tier configuration to their Teamcenter database. The free Teamcenter Mobility client also allows access to a public read-only data set that is actually hosted in the cloud. Making the same cloud platform option available to customers was simply the next logical step for them.
I believe the customers most attracted to this platform will be small the small-business customers. The large enterprise customers with large existing capital investments in their data infrastructure and IT staffing will probably not find this as attractive as the SMB market.
Certainly there are many CFOs the world over smiling today.
What does remain to be seem however is how this impacts the competition, specifically the big guys. What happens when the market-leading PLM vendor is the first to offer their product over the cloud? PTC certainly seems to be on the way down this path. Dassault Systèmes has been more quiet of late. With other players such as Autodesk and Arena embracing the cloud, the competition will certainly be interesting. We'll just have have to wait and see what shakes out...
In the meantime, I have to go lay down and breath into a paper bag.
Agree? Disagree? I'd love to hear your opinions...