Cadalyst - March 2008 - (Page 39)

plmstrategies Writer–Reader Collaboration A s I embark on my third year as “PLM Strategies” columnist, I’m seeking inspiration from my most trusted source: my readers. I’d like to shape the content of this column to better serve your interests. I welcome your comments, topic suggestions, feedback, and even criticism. (One of you once cautioned me against the overuse of PLM. Since then, I’ve placed a moratorium on myself never to let the offending acronym occur more than a dozen times per article. I’m proud to say this one came in under budget at 10.) My mailbox is now open! Much to Do” (Intelligent Enterprise, July 2005). Apparently, IBM has done much of what’s required in the past two years. According to Srinivasan, Big Blue is putting SOA into practice in some of its own facilities. IBM’s procurement and manufacturing centers, which are largely based in China, India, Taiwan, and other Asian outsourcing nirvanas, have been scooping up local talents straight out of colleges and universities. The user interface most familiar to these young IBM troopers “is Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox,” observed Srinivasan. So IBM decided to let them delve into the business systems through role-based portals. “If you’re a procurement engineer, you access procurement information using Explorer through your portal, which looks like a regular Web page,” Srinivasan explained. But what these users don’t know (and probably don’t care) is that, behind the scene, IBM has used SOA to combine three major systems: a PDM system (Dassault’s ENOVIA), a part-selection system (i2’s eXplore), and a technical database (housed in an IBM DB2 installation). “We exposed all of the [software systems’ functions and features] as services then made the relevant ones available to the people through the portals,” Srinivasan said. That means the new hire in Mumbai or Beijing will never have to learn to use a PDM system. Nor does he or she need to know how to query a DB2 database. For IBM, “85% of these users, we found out, are read-only users,” Srinivasan remarked. “They’re not editing the info.” So why teach them to use a complex piece of software? This has enormous financial implications for a global enterprise like IBM. One of the line items it can dramatically reduce with this method is the training cost. But SOA is still in its early stages of success. IBM is able to launch a pilot project because it’s a hardware/IT giant with $24.1 billion in annual revenues (as reported for Q3 in 2007). The initial cost of developing the middleware necessary to implement SOA can be “literally billions — with a big B,” admitted Srinivasan. That’s why, he predicted, industries with much bigger coffers — for instance, finance, insurance, and healthcare — may take the lead. Because the middleware is not industry specific, the rest will benefit from their early investment. lection of solutions, not a single solution that covers the entire lifecycle. “Most businesses I speak to have as big an investment in SAP or Oracle as they do in engineering systems,” Srinivasan said. “So, if you are talking about the lifecycle, of course you need to include [enterprise systems such as Oracle and SAP] too.” Most PLM vendors disagree with the inclusion of enterprise/business systems into the category, but they won’t dispute that the engineering applications must be able to communicate effectively with the rest so they can realize their ultimate PLM vision. So what allows metadata to travel back and forth among CAD systems (CATIA, NX, Pro/ENGINEER), PDM systems (Dassault’s ENOVIA, Siemens PLM’s Teamcenter, SolidWorks’ PDMWorks, PTC’s Windchill), and ERP systems (Oracle, SAP)? Middleware implemented on SOA. Teaching BusinessOriented Engineering In addition to his role as a 25-year veteran researcher at IBM, Srinivasan also happens to be a professor at Columbia University. In line with his vision, he’s proposing classes that teach engineering and business skills in parallel. It’s an approach inspired by what he’s seen at Stanford and MIT, he said. The business education will cover “business strategy, the extent to which business strategy affects the product strategy; marketing, the use of sophisticated computer models and virtual products to study what products people prefer, what configurations they respond to, and so on; and finance, the study of sourcing, cost estimation, funding, and pricing,” Srinivasan said. Such a class may well be the birthplace for a new breed of engineers who are just as conscious of profit and loss as they are of XML. c Cadalyst contributing editor Kenneth Wong explores the innovative use of technology and its implications. E-mail him at Kenneth. Wong at cadalyst.com. www.cadalyst.com | cadalyst | March 2008 The Middleman Currently, IBM has partnership agreements with all three PLM titans: Dassault, PTC, and Siemens PLM Software (formerly UGS). Over the years I have tried, to the best of my ability, to sort through the artfully obscured marketing phraseology to understand where IBM’s loyalty lies, but to no avail. I’ve come to the conclusion that, when it comes to lifecycle management, IBM prefers to be the proverbial middleman. For the purpose of this column, middleware is, as the term suggests, the software that sits somewhere between the operating system and the purpose-built application. As one of the largest middleware merchants, neutrality benefits IBM the most. “The big three, as you call them,” Srinivasan said, “are in fact providing CAD, CAM (computer-aided manufacturing), CAE (computeraided engineering), and PDM (product data management) systems.” The implication is, they’re supplying a col- 39 http://www.cadalyst.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Cadalyst - March 2008

Cadalyst - March 2008 Contents Editor's Window CAD Central Thicker than Water Safe Keeping — Backup Software Secures Your Designs AMD’s ATI FireGL Graphics Cards AutoCAD Civil 3D 2008 — Surveying, Civil Engineering, and Land Development Software Cool Software Utilities for Your Job History, Nonhistory, or Both? In the Eye of the Storm Builders’ Information Modeling CAD Cartoon Issue Indexes CAD from the Streets

Cadalyst - March 2008

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