Aras Enterprise SaaS PLM Software

Introduction to the Role of the Cloud and SaaS in Enterprise Transformation

The adoption of cloud services, specifically the migration of almost all types of enterprise systems to the cloud, has progressed aggressively since the cloud’s introduction and is expected to continue.

While it is logical to assume major advantages of moving enterprise solutions to the cloud are related to improved technological capabilities, the power of organizational changes that drive business process improvements cannot be ignored as major contributors to the overall value of cloud offerings. Considerable financial benefits are realized from incremental improvements of internal processes that are currently the responsibility of internal IT departments, data centers, and operations from typical on-premise implementations. The size and complexity of enterprise deployments continues to grow and with them, the effort to meet performance and availability expectations by expanding global user communities. Companies have found that fulfilling these expectations comes with hefty costs for continual capital investments in high-tech data centers and expensive resources that are necessary to execute day-to-day operations. Moving to the cloud provides companies the opportunity to outsource these efforts to specialized providers delivering better service levels while reducing organizational overhead.

The purpose of this white paper is to explore the cloud as a vehicle for business transformation and the expanded benefits accrued when SaaS is the deployment model rather than focusing on the technology components of cloud services.

Shared (public) cloud as a service for infrastructure, platforms, and various software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings continue to be the largest, and fastest increasing, engines of growth for the whole cloud market. Combined, spending on the shared cloud services—IaaS, system infrastructure software as a service (SISaaS), PaaS, and SaaS—will total $385 billion in 2021 and will grow at a CAGR of over 21.0% through 2025, reaching $809 billion.

IDC, WORLDWIDE WHOLE CLOUD FORECAST, 2021–2025: THE PATH AHEAD FOR CLOUD IN A DIGITAL-FIRST WORLD, September 2021, IDC #US47397521

What does it mean to be in the Cloud?

The concept of being in the cloud can sometimes be confused with a SaaS deployment. Companies often deploy systems on a public cloud using platforms like Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS or Google GCP to leverage their infrastructure. With these deployments, the responsibility of operational tasks associated with infrastructure is also moved to the cloud provider. What doesn’t change is the responsibility for day-to-day operations of the application and platform which remains in the control of the company’s internal IT departments, much in the way they have been traditionally executed. This is typically known as infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and the benefits are easily identified. By using an IaaS offering, companies utilize the cloud provider’s data center, infrastructure and resources, shifting the investment of the physical environment to the provider. This is particularly advantageous to the subscriber since all of these providers have made substantial investments in their own state-of-the art data centers which supply the latest technology. Since they maintain nearly an unlimited infrastructure capacity, they can quickly provision the necessary infrastructure for each individual company as needed, significantly reducing the administrative and professional effort for a company and providing their customers the ability to quickly scale for growth. Furthermore, these data centers create a highly secure barrier from outside forces protecting a company’s valuable data. For instance, with Microsoft Azure’s data center:

Access to physical data center facilities is tightly controlled by outer and inner perimeters with increasing security at each level, including perimeter fencing, security officers, locked server racks, integrated alarm systems, around-the-clock video surveillance by the operations center, and multi-factor access control. Only required personnel are authorized to access Microsoft data centers. Logical access to Microsoft 365 infrastructure, including customer data, is prohibited from within Microsoft data centers.

Microsoft, Microsoft Security Overview

The IaaS business model depends on the cloud provider’s capability to service a large number of companies and systems with massive volumes of data. The benefits of this economy of scale, combined with the efficiencies of utilizing the latest technology and leveraging a highly trained, global workforce create a business model that individual companies, even some of the world’s largest, cannot compete against. In return, it provides companies with the ability to use capital that was previously needed to fund their own data centers for other investments capable of providing a higher return.

Extending the Value of the Cloud with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

A SaaS deployment extends the concept of providing infrastructure as a service to include everything necessary to establish and manage an application for a customer—from the software and hardware, to deployment activities and day-to-day operations. While not all cloud deployments are ‘Software as a Service,’ all SaaS deployments are in the cloud. A company delivering a SaaS offering to a subscriber creates a turn-key environment for their customers, usually providing little more than an URL to access it. Other services like training and specialized integrations may or may not be included as SaaS offerings vary.

What is critical to a SaaS offering is the Service Level Agreement (SLA). This document outlines everything from the responsibilities of the customer and provider to performance, availability metrics, and security protocols. SaaS offerings commoditize a software system so the provider can license it to customers as a service, allowing companies to alleviate the work required to host, deliver, and manage the system internally. This model allows a company to reduce its internal IT footprint considerably.

Let’s consider a large, public company that creates and commercializes cosmetics. The company owns their own data center, leveraging a mix of internal and external resources. The costs of running their data center with a staff of highly paid, technical resources increases every year. The high demand for critical resources globally has created high turnover leading to additional recruiting and on-boarding costs. Constant changes in security and privacy regulations have also led to yearly investments in infrastructure and retraining of critical resources. Furthermore, the day-to-day management of their systems such as software upgrades and delivering higher system performance expectations has regularly added to unexpected infrastructure costs. Since the data center is responsible for hundreds of applications, the staff does not have the bandwidth to receive extensive training on all their systems, so they require consultants to help with complicated issues to meet their service level agreements. To manage the spiraling costs, they have outsourced some of this operations work to an offshore company.

As the management team determines their future organizational strategy, the questions they (and many other companies) are asking themselves are as follows:

• Are these responsibilities a core competency of our organization?
• Does owning these tasks internally distract ourselves as an organization from our own business mission?
• Are there specific benefits to our organization when we execute this function internally?
• Would hiring a specialized provider deliver the same or better service levels for roughly the same or better costs?

These are typical questions asked by executives as they consider SaaS offerings. Realistically, companies that run hundreds of applications from their own data center cannot move this function overnight, but the pieces are in place to aggressively start driving an overall strategy to potentially replace their own data center. Today, all companies work with multiple third-party providers and most already have at least one SaaS product in their application landscape. By reducing the overhead of IT, companies can focus on their core competencies and what is most valuable to them, regardless of whether the improvements involve a lipstick or a wind turbine design.

Why Companies are Moving Their PLM Ahead with Cloud and SaaS Now

Consider the following points:

• New demands on legacy, on-premise PLM systems are increasing with a concentrated focus on implementing digital transformation strategies.
• New digital transformation strategies require a high level of flexibility from a PLM solution to fulfill a company’s specific needs.
• Companies are struggling to meet new requirements on their legacy PLM solutions due to technical debt created from years of customizations.
• Companies have sacrificed upgrades due to the expected high investment after years of falling behind.
• Adoption of SaaS PLM solutions have lagged behind other enterprise applications.
• Many SaaS PLM offerings are either limited in flexibility and/or the completeness of solution.

When one looks at the current state of PLM, it is easy to see the situation as unsustainable. After investing years and millions of dollars in existing PLM solutions, companies are left to contend with unsupported versions of their applications, unsustainable business logic due to heavy customizations and outdated technology as other enterprise systems move their applications to the cloud. Additionally, logistical issues created from COVID-19, global supply chain challenges and new, complex business strategies have created high demands on PLM systems forcing IT organizations to face the question of how to move their PLM system forward.

Companies realize that layering more customizations on their outdated, legacy systems often create more issues than they solve. Additional technical debt, new bugs and data issues affect ROI when implementing new business strategies and leave the PLM system more precarious for the next set of enhancements. Additionally, if a company wants to upgrade their application to the latest version before starting a new phase of major enhancements, they usually find this effort itself will cause cost and timing issues for the project. At this point, there are no easy answers.

Ultimately, it forces a much larger question—can your PLM solution meet your future needs, or will a different solution better meet tomorrow’s demands?

How Enterprise SaaS Addresses PLM Priorities

Today, the cloud underpins most new technological disruptions, including composable business, and has proven itself during times of uncertainty with its resiliency, scalability, flexibility and speed. Hybrid, multicloud and edge environments are growing and setting the stage for new distributed cloud models. In addition, new wireless communications advances, such as 5G R16 and R17, will push cloud adoption to a new level of broader, deeper and ubiquitous usage.

Gartner, Gartner Says Four Trends Are Shaping the Future of Public Cloud, August 2, 2021

As executives and IT professionals strategize on their future PLM vision, industry analysts agree cloud deployments will dominate the next generations of solutions. There are several compelling arguments for utilizing IaaS for PLM, but these benefits are supplemented with additional advantages provided with a SaaS PLM licensing model.

Operational effectiveness delivered with professional expertise

Based on our research and industrial consulting experience, CIMdata believes that the flexibility and scalability of cloud-delivered SaaS solutions can significantly help companies execute their digital transformation plan.

CIMdata, Leveraging the Cloud for Global Market Success, 2021

The cloud offers virtually unlimited infrastructure and scalability as part of an IaaS offering. It also provides state-of-the-art security and reliability essential for future PLM solutions. A SaaS PLM offering extends the value of IaaS to provide expert resources that specialize in the day-to-day operations of a specific PLM solution in the cloud. The specialized skill set provides deep technical knowledge on how to best align the solution with the infrastructure to provide the reliability, security, and elasticity customers require, ensuring the highest operational standards are achieved.

Upgradeability

This white paper focuses on the nature of legacy PLM systems falling behind partly due to the cost and complexity of executing upgrades. This situation is often corrected in SaaS solutions since offerings like these guarantee regular upgrades executed by the provider. This is possible for two reasons. First, most SaaS solutions provide the same functionality to the whole customer base with little capability to customize each instance. This streamlines the upgrade process considerably across customers. Second, the value of SaaS offerings to the provider is predicated on managing the solution for a base of customers simultaneously. Since it is in the best interest of the provider to maintain their customer’s base on the latest software version, they have a strong incentive to ensure their customers are upgraded on a timely basis. Regular upgrades ultimately benefit PLM customers by guaranteeing updates for the latest bug fixes and availability of new functionality, potentially eliminating the need for some customizations.

The tradeoff for most SaaS offerings for PLM is with systematic upgrades assuming uniformity across all their subscribing companies, customizations become limited or even restricted. This may be acceptable for SaaS solution in other types of enterprise solutions, but enterprise PLM customers almost always require customizations to meet their organizations needs.

Accessibility

The cloud offers a nearly universal delivery mechanism, providing on-demand compute power and almost ubiquitous connectivity.

CIMdata, 2021 Market Analysis Report Series, PLM Industry Analysis Report, July 2021

The recent pandemic and subsequent quarantine measures showed companies why resiliency is critical in a PLM solution. One of the clearest examples is how quickly user communities changed locations during this time. As internal users relocated to home offices and external supply chain partners changed and moved across continents, infrastructure needed to be modified quickly to accommodate new users in new locations. In some cases, this even meant data center locations needed to be reevaluated to support drastic geography changes. Organizations that were already in the cloud were able to manage the changes efficiently while SaaS subscribers also had the operational expertise and licensing flexibility to make necessary changes to support the paradigm shift.

Flexible licensing

“SaaS is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted, often using cloud infrastructure. SaaS provides flexible licensing options—you only pay for what you need, while you need it.”

CIMdata, Leveraging the Cloud for Global Market Success, 2021

Enterprise PLM implementations are often delivered in phases, sometimes spanning fiscal years. Having the flexibility to add licenses as functionality is released to larger user groups over time improves the business case and allows the ROI to align with the release schedule. Organizations may also have the flexibility to adjust license usage to changes in their deployment schedules if required.

Cross-platform compatibility

As a company’s digital transformation efforts increase, so does PLM’s importance as the digital backbone of the organization. The ability to connect data from different applications and make it available to users located around the world is vital. SaaS PLM solutions are accessible through web browsers on almost any device supporting cross platform compatibility. Users can access information from anywhere even using their mobile devices, boosting productivity and efficiency.

Aras Enterprise SaaS: More Powerful Than Any Other SaaS Offering for PLM

When Aras created the Enterprise SaaS solution, its commitment was to deliver the same level of completeness and resiliency in the cloud that was available with any on-premise PLM solution. Only Aras Enterprise SaaS provides a fully capable, business-ready SaaS PLM environment with complete Systems Engineering and Digital Thread solution ready to transform your organization, all available in a single offering. Perhaps the most important capability of Aras Enterprise SaaS is its ability to customize applications and build new applications in the cloud while still maintaining its obligation to deliver regular upgrades to customers. This can only be accomplished by Aras’ resilient platform.

One fundamental capability a modern PLM system must have is the ability to create a digital model and digital thread from product life-cycle data to communicate and collaborate across the team, at any point in the life cycle. IDC believes the open, service-based architecture that Aras is built upon provides the flexible approach needed to create, manage, and optimize this digital thread. The company was well positioned for the COVID-19 pandemic, with a resilient platform that can be deployed, scaled, and upgraded in whatever way the client needs, whether on premises, private cloud, or public cloud or a combined, hybrid approach, which is the common way manufacturers handle R&D and engineering application deployment.

IDC, Cloud-Based, Digitally Transformed PLM Empowers the Resilient Organization, 2021

Unlimited customizations

Aras has chosen a path to the cloud that will make it easier for their customers to continue to leverage the strengths of the Aras solution, particularly around customization and migration/upgrades. Given that many industrial companies have shown their desire to customize this should be seen as beneficial.

CIMdata, Podcast, PLM Cloud and SaaS Adoption – Understanding the Customer’s Viewpoint, 2021

While smaller companies may be comfortable adopting predefined processes and models of an out-of-the-box PLM offering, our experience has confirmed that mid to large size organizations require the support of organization-specific requirements that can only be accomplished with customizations. Aras Enterprise SaaS is the only SaaS PLM offering to support unlimited customizations and the capabilities to create unique solutions with no limits to complexity. Simply, it has the power to meet an organization’s most complex business requirements.

Furthermore, Aras Enterprise SaaS also provides subscribers with Aras DevOps Solutions. Aras DevOps delivers a turnkey, continuous integration environment entirely hosted and supported by Aras on the Aras Cloud. Aras’ deployment framework, based on industry standards and preconfigured to work with the Aras platform automates and optimizes system change processes to power a DevOps culture.

…being able to customize offers that much more ability to change your path or to overcome changes in roadmap from your chosen provider. This is where someone like Aras can have an advantage.

Upgrade delivered on your schedule

While many PLM solutions have been struggling to manage upgrade issues in their legacy, on-premise solutions, Aras has always been a step ahead. Aras has executed customer upgrades, including customer specific customizations, as part of the Aras Innovator subscription for years. This commitment has assured customers they would be able to leverage new functionality as it became available from Aras’ roadmap and never fall behind. Unlike other SaaS PLM offerings that force upgrades on their subscribers, Aras delivers upgrades on the customer’s schedule eliminating compliance issues, risks and associated liabilities of systematic updates.

Valuable expertise

As with any technology, an enterprise solution will only operate as effectively as the people who manage it. While there are many service providers offering managed service agreements, only Aras Enterprise SaaS offers the world-class expertise that built the Aras platform as part of the team to manage it for its customers. These resources provide unrivaled expertise with the exclusive knowledge and extensive experience to optimize the scalability, elasticity, automation, failover and recovery processes of Aras Innovator.

Security you can count on

Enterprise SaaS guarantees the security, availability, and confidentiality of critical data with SOC2 and CSA STAR certifications minimizing exposure of sensitive information and risk of a data breach. Sam Zawaideh, Aras VP of global consulting explains, “While many of our competitors fail to take these measures, we believe that Cloud service organizations must show that they have the right safeguards and controls to keep data secure and provide their customers with the best performing and available systems. These standards keep us accountable to our mission of giving our customers the peace of mind in utilizing our Aras Cloud offerings.”