You may be aware that CIMdata has been hosting a series of educational webinars. We have seen record attendance and many of the past webinars are available for replay from the CIMdata on-Demand page of our website. I recently hosted a webinar on IoT which generated lots of questions that we did not have time to answer live and and I am working my way through them. Here are a few. For those of you who were unable to join the webinar you can watch it here.

Watch this space.

Stan

Can you comment on what IoT means to CAE or Simulation & Analysis space? What other companies are doing?

More software in products has led to an emphasis on systems thinking and systems engineering, so this should become more important, and S&A/CAE is a big part of that. Again, as I discussed in the Webinar, there is still a lot of work to do here, as many PLM solution providers do not currently do a good job on the “smart” part of the product, i.e., the software.

System Engineering is the key to IoT from a PLM perspective. My question is PLM takes lot of time to implement/deploy with IoT being so much fast paced, how are we going to catch up?

Clearly I agree, given my last answer. PLM can (and often has) taken a long time to implement, but as I often say, people who provide products and services are doing PLM if they do not have one piece of software from Autodesk, Dassault Systèmes, PTC, Siemens PLM Software or any of the others.

I think that some parts of IoT will be fast to deploy. With the tools available, you can connect your things and capture data with little coding. What to do with the data, how to change your business processes, and even how to change your company strategy are much harder questions. If you are going to get into this it should be a conscious decision that is only partly technological.

How do you practically see integration between IoT and PLM?

It depends on what your plans are for the data. If you are getting data back from your products in the field, I guess you could just use it to act. But that is not the power of IoT and PLM working together. Designers scream for operational data, and now they can have TBs of it. Smart connected companies will systematically bring this data back into the design, engineering and manufacturing parts of their business to inform their decision-making processes.

Will the number of available IP addresses become a problem with billions and trillions of IoT devices?

If you enter “total number of ip addresses” into Google it suggests to add “in ipv6” to the search. You get: “The Internet now has 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses. The IPv6 launch has expanded the number of Internet addresses to 340 undecillion.” (Jun 6, 2012) I think we are good (for now).

How will the PLM service industry evolve with IoT?

As I discussed in the Webinar, I think that they need to evolve to be the trusted partner to their industrial clients to help them navigate this IoT world. Some are doing it through partnerships, like Wipro with ThingWorx. Others are building their own platforms. They too would benefit themselves, and their customers, if they got involved in the relevant standards bodies and advocated for their constituencies.

So far, PTC is the only CAD vendor with an IoT product. Do you know if any other CAD vendor is working on IoT?

Autodesk talks a lot about “makers” and has done a lot to support potential makers of things. Many Autodesk University presentations over the last few years fit here. They also bought circuits.io a few years ago that provides some needed modeling capabilities. (See this link for the commentary I wrote at the time.) https://www.cimdata.com/en/resources/complimentary-reports-research/commentaries/item/513-ptc-bets-big-on-the-internet-of-things-commentary

Siemens PLM Software is talking about their Smart Innovation Portfolio and is working to support IoT-related use cases.

I am sure there might be others, but these come to mind.(This is one problem mentioning the names of specific software and services companies in CIMdata talks – the ones that are NOT mentioned by name complain that they were not – two complaints from this one Webinar.)

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