What’s going to upset them? It’s simply this: despite lots of strategy talks with customers and high-concept keynotes at user conferences from the big PLM vendors, the first company across the finish line with a true cloud application for the PLM community is Vuuch.

There. I’ve said it. Now I have to convince you it’s an accurate assertion. But first, let me be very clear: I am not saying that Vuuch is a PLM system (far from it! Perish the thought!). When I talk about PLM, I am talking about the PLM market — or what I like to call the manufacturing technology market (and what Chris Williams likes to call the product development market).

So, how did Vuuch get there first?

1. Vuuch has no baggage from a legacy architecture. Vuuch was designed from the ground up for multi-tenancy and cloud deployment.  (Learn more about this in our security white paper.)
2. Vuuch’s default deployment option is the cloud. Deployment as a marker for true cloud-ness might not seem obvious at first, but consider what everyone else in the PLM market is talking about. They promise to add cloud deployment “features” to existing platforms and say they’ll “get there” when customers are ready. Seems to us that a partial cloud deployment is just that — partial. And we all know what a mess that can be. Plus, what customer isn’t ready today for savings in deployment costs, the ability to scale by credit card (my term for buying just what you need) and reducing IT overhead?
3. Vuuch is a service and a web service. I don’t want to get too geeky…well, OK, here goes. To be a true cloud app, it’s not enough to have a web portal that users access. That’s what Gmail is. Instead of your messages being stored on an internal server behind a corporate firewall, they are stored on Google’s servers. Big deal. That ain’t what we call cloud. To really be a cloud app, the application must have an API that can be called remotely. That is, it must not only have UI, it must be callable from other applications, using cloud technologies. Vuuch does this with our own plug-ins, which call an open API. Customers who want to integrate Vuuch with legacy PLM and ERP systems can simply call the API. (Our API is based on REST protocols, the cloud successor to bloated SOAP calls from the SOA era.)

I could go on. But I think if you look hard at the whole span of technology in the PLM marketplace, you will be hard-pressed to find another pure cloud app today besides Vuuch.

Let the debate begin! I look forward to your comments.

Update: By sheer coincidence, my friends at Dassault Systèmes announced their “cloud strategy” today. Here are links to their press releases (no charge for the traffic, guys): one about 3DS and Amazon Web Services and another about V6 “in the cloud.”

Clearly, their use of AWS is a temporary measure to relieve the marketing pressure to have a cloud strategy. The release is full of AWS-buzz-speak, designed to impress the impressionable. But it can’t hide the fact that they are going to load up an AWS large instance with the full-weight V6, assign it an elastic IP, mark up the usage charges, hit you for a full V6 installation and call it a day.

So, say you bet your PLM farm on that move — and later want to get on board the “real” DS cloud offering as described in the second release. What, exactly, would you get that’s different by virtue of being in the cloud? Could it be that DS (though its new investment in Outscale) will simply migrate your AWS instance to Outscale? Where is the description of the actual decomposition of V6 into a series of lightweight cloud entities?

Bottom line, I am confused..and I’ll bet you are, too. I really don’t understand how this takes V6 into the cloud.

Also, I feel compelled to point out that just three weeks after Vuuch 4.5 was announced and we laid out specifically what we are doing in the cloud, a major PLM vendor responds. Unfortunately, the marketing pressure to make legacy systems “cloud ready” today has the potential to, ahem, cloud up the real promise of cloud computing in customers’ minds by diluting it to simple data center replacements.

I realize how self-serving it sounds, but this is one of those cases in which real innovation from cloud computing in the PLM market can come only from companies without gigantic legacy platforms conceived and architected in a previous era of large-scale computing. You need a clean-sheet design, like Vuuch.

I’m sure that this is not the last we have heard of www.cloudswitch.com and it will be interesting to keep an eye on the service they release.  Here is a link to the press release http://www.cloudswitch.com/cloud-computing-system/.

If you are not a believer in the cloud then you should reflect a bit on your own life to see if you are already there…  Take out that old fashion and out dated design tool called a napkin and jot down the cloud services you are already using.  I bet this list might surprise you:

1. For me I backup 100GB of data at my home using www.Amazon.com and www.jungledisk.com
2. I host my photos at chriswilliams.smugmug.com (the best photo sharing site) 
3. Sometimes I post on www.flickr.com (the worst)
4. Vuuch has a channel on www.youtube.com
5. OH you just can’t forget www.online_banking.com and do you have any idea how your ATM communicates?
6. The hot one on the block www.twitter.com (@Vuuch)
7. www.yammer.com (just an experiment for me)
8. Three WordPress blogs, blog.vuuch.com and a two I never seem to write in…
9. A survey solution from www.surveymonkey.com
10. Leads and contact management using www.salesforce.com which is integrated into Vuuch
11. Some very cool editing tools for images and audio from www.aviary.com/
12. www.linkedin.com
13. www.classmates.com
14. www.facebook.com
15. My blackberry mail service
16. Videos from www.vudu.com
17. And so many accounts for mundane stuff I just cannot remember them. 

And if you still think it is not going to happen then speak to your kids.  Just the other day my 11 year old asked me to get him that WEB site used for editing documents – what he was asking for is MS WORD!  To him WORD is just another WEB site…  Google docs will certainly display MS (Which by the way is now what our middle school uses). 

OH and I forgot one other cloud service I use every day, my www.vuuch.me account!!!