One of the last holdouts in cloud deployment, PTC, announced yesterday that it’s porting its Windchill PLM software to the cloud. The goal it appears is to address the needs of the small- to mid-sized (SMB) business market, a demographic that’s been largely left out of the PLM market. These companies often didn’t have the IT resources to support a full-scale PLM deployment and prefer the SAAS business model that enables them flexible, subscription-based pricing.

The PTC PLM Cloud is based on PTC Windchill, a proven technology with over 1.5 million seats deployed and a platform that was designed from the beginning as a web-based approach to PLM. The result is a true PLM cloud solution, specifically designed to enable team collaboration and product data sharing. This accelerates product development and helps design teams that are stretched across different locations, working with varying CAD applications or coordinating with partners and suppliers.

The PTC cloud offering eliminates the typical, but risky, SMB practice of shared folders and file naming conventions, which can hamper product development. With more effective and reliable data sharing in the cloud, customers are able to improve product development across teams in different locations, teams working with varying CAD applications, and with external teams such as partners and suppliers who are a growing part of the product development process.

“The value of PTC PLM Cloud is clear,” said Peter Bilello, President, CIMdata. “PTC’s offering has been designed to allow smaller companies, which have previously been unable to rapidly implement PLM capabilities, to quickly deploy and adopt key data management, visualization and reuse functionality. Those are all vital capabilities for any company in the business of developing products.”

Specific benefits of PTC PLM Cloud are:
Security. PTC’s cloud environment is compliant with ISO 27001:2013 which outlines standard protocols for information security management.
Availability. PTC PLM Cloud is based on PTC’s existing hosted PLM environment which achieves 99.5% availability.
Speed. PTC PLM Cloud performance has been optimized for distributed teams.
Time-to-Value. PTC PLM Cloud enables rapid PLM adoption and accelerated product development processes, enabling improved on-time delivery.
Total Cost of Ownership. PTC PLM Cloud allows for reduced technology acquisition and system administration costs.

“Our main objective when deciding for PTC Windchill on the Cloud was to have central repository of up-to-date product information and efficient delivery of that data to customers and technical support staff, but at the same time to minimize the burden on IT while maintaining a predictable monthly cost,” said Vinny Guercio, VP Engineering, RAB Lighting. “With PTC, we have met our goals.”

Availability

PTC PLM Cloud will be available March 2015 in the following packages:
Standard–a shared, pre-configured PTC Windchill instance that enables immediate go-live
Premium–a dedicated PTC Windchill instance that supports customer-specific system configuration
Enterprise–a dedicated PTC Windchill instance that supports customer-specific system configuration and integrations to corporate systems

You can find more information on the PTC PLM Cloud Resource page. You can also watch a PTC PLM Cloud demo video that shows a synopsis of how the solution will work here.

Barb Schmitz