I spent time over the weekend watching Siemens RealizeLIVE event recording and catching up on the news about the new Siemens SaaS PLM offering called Teamcenter X. A few weeks ago, I mentioned Siemens PLM announced in my article – Siemens Teamcenter X and PLM SaaS Rally. Now, it is time to take a deeper look at what is Teamcenter X.

The bigger vision of Siemens is its Xcelerator platform, which is planning to provide a backbone for a variety of customers and deliver an industry network effect. I like the slide and show a grand vision of future connected systems. It reminded me of my PLM 2030 article.

From the grand vision to cloud PLM strategy, Siemens speaks about the advantages of the cloud, which I’m completely aligned with.

Step down from visions to realization to what is actually offered. The following slide is a bit high level to speak about what is included in Teamcenter X, but you can learn – base, add-ins, and personalized.

The interesting part of this breakdown is actually the personalization. The Achilles heel of scaling down large PLM platforms to SaaS or hosting offering is to disable all customization. A number of PLM vendors did it in the past by providing out of the box solutions and hosted offerings. It is not clear what Teamcenter X does about it.

The following slide caught my special attention. Because it provided answers on the question – What is Teamcenter X?

I can see Fast and Secure kind of obvious. High availability and always up to date are obvious for SaaS software. Compatible is an interesting one because it most probably means that whatever you do will be compatible with the next upgrade and it is Siemens’s job to make it work. The last one is probably one of the key differences – fixed price. My hunch, it is a reflection of the Teamcenter Hosted solution available today. My guess is that the cost of IaaS infrastructure can be variable and as a customer, you don’t like the idea of paying for spikes. And Teamcenter X is about to solve it by offering a subscription cost.

I like to get first hands to experience Teamcenter X SaaS. So, I submitted a trial request. You cannot get it started immediately, but the software promised me to get back in 1-2 business days.

What is my conclusion?

Siemens was one of the last PLM companies coming out with a SaaS solution. Just a week before RealizeLIVE, PTC announced their Atlas platform. Teamcenter X seems to be an interesting hybrid of different technologies and I’m going to dig deeper to learn what is actually the difference between Teamcenter and Teamcenter X. The technology and product is clearly a mix of both. The recipe of the mix is important because it gives you an idea of how efficient Teamcenter X will be for the PLM market. The market is clearly looking for new solutions. Will Teamcenter X be the one market need to most? What is missing in Teamcenter X? These are great questions to ask. The jury is out. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups, and supply chain. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.

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