Cloud and its potential to transform PLM landscape

What are the typical scenarios where cloud can be potential differentiator in customer's business ?

Two posts caught my attention one on Applying Cloud to Mid size business and success of  Dutch Enterprises with cloud.

Later post contains plenty of success stories using AWS.

"...almost industry vertical Dutch companies are moving ahead rapidly to ensure that they can keep up with the global competition. Dutch enterprises from Media & Advertising, Financial Services, Energy, Transportation and Shipping, Life Sciences and Healthcare are experiencing the transformative nature of Cloud Computing; how IT can be enabler of innovation and greatly improve agility with traditional organizations"

Big  question that comes to my mind when and how can we see more of these stories from PLM world?

Personally these stories from other enterprises fuel optimism that cloud can really happen soon in context of PLM solutions as well. After all PLM is about managing product information, surrounding processes and associated people.


Here are some cases I thought, cloud can make a difference:
Collaboration with Suppliers:
Collaboration between OEM and Suppliers for design and manufacturing data exchange is one case where Enterprises struggle. Based on degree of collaboration the data exchange can be highly integrated to loosely coupled.
Can cloud add value by rapid on-boarding of suppliers within OEM ecosystem? This is especially true with lot of small-sized suppliers who do not have capabilities to deploy and administer IT environments.
Using cloud to integrate these suppliers into value chain will perhaps lead to new wave of innovation for OEM, as increased product content comes from suppliers.


Design collaboration with Alliance Partners:
With Global development and manufacturing becoming inevitable, exchange of data is another issue where performance is the key. Getting design data replicated across the globe within available window period is the key. Many IT organizations struggle to handle the multi-site replication.

Rather than spending internal resources, it makes sense for IT organizations to leverage expertise of cloud providers who are rapidly improving data replication and availability front.

Value-added services:
Like it or not managing product data with excel is something that happens a lot in the reality. Consider example of computing part cost.
Is it possible to provide a third party service to compute part cost including tooling, packaging and transportation cost?

Using cloud based SaaS services it will save organizations effort to deploy & maintain custom solutions but will give opportunity to built in standards and reference external sources efficiently.

I am sure there are many more areas where cloud can be used to as competitive  advantage ..  Looking forward to the possibilities !