Whenever a new technology or technical capability becomes available it is widely hyped as “the next big thing.” Everyone talks and tweets about it, companies and conferences pile on the bandwagon, and applications pop up like rabbits. Eventually the hype dies down and whatever it is finds its rightful place in our everyday IT toolbox. Except the cloud.
The cloud has been with us for a while now so it should be entrenched as just one of many deployment options in a good IT strategy. Yet every single day I see another article touting the cloud as a “game changer”.
The cloud is not a magic elixir. It’s not going to re-engineer your business, optimize your strategy or help you lose 10 lbs (unless you’re carrying a server). All the cloud is going to do is move your data or apps from down the hall or down the street, to someplace else that you probably won’t ever put your finger on. That’s it folks.
In my world, which is PLM, I meet lots of people who think the cloud can help them address / improve their complex engineering and business processes. The cloud provides space, not intelligence. It’s apples to oranges. To handle ever-changing complex processes you need advanced modeling technology.
At Aras, we’re cloud-ready if and when you are. If you want to deploy your PLM solution in the cloud, that’s no problem. If you want us to host it, we can do that too. If you want it right down the hall, that’s fine with us. We can even do a little of each, if that’s what you’d like.
The point is, it’s not about where you’re running, it’s about what you’re running. And companies that don’t get that are destined to wind up with their data locked down in some proprietary cloud configuration with less access and bigger problems than they had before.