The Dassault Systemes Cloud Strategy – Part 4

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This basically wraps up what I believe to be Dassault Systemes cloud strategy. To sum it up, first get people to ditch files and use PLM, then move the PLM to the cloud and the software will follow it. Whether it succeeds or not is anybody’s guess. That’s assuming that this is their strategy in the first place. If you notice, most of what I have written in this series is stuff that the company is already doing or said that they will do. So maybe I am not that far from the target after all.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not anti-cloud or anti-PLM or pro-file or some other combination. I know for a fact that computing is increasingly going to move from the computer to other devices of various form factors for various purposes. We are already seeing that happening. At the same time, I also believe that computing and data storage will not necessarily remain on the device itself. I am pretty sure that my boys (now 6.5 and 2.5) are going to laugh at me when I tell them that my computer had a hard disk on which I used to install all my software and store all my data. Or that I used to carry my data around with me on a flash drive. Today, when I flip the switch of a light bulb, I don’t spend a moment wondering whether the bulb will light up or not. In time internet will be as reliable and available as electricity is today, with power backup, may I add. I remember one day when my elder son was three years old, there was a power failure at night, a very common occurrence in my part of the world. For some reason my inverter failed to kick in. He started shrieking his lungs out. It was then that I realized that he had never seen pitch darkness ever in his entire life of three years. We always kept a dim light on in the bedroom at night. That’s how reliable the power system in my house was.

Our kids are going to grow up in a world very different from ours. For them the cloud or some variant of it will come naturally. In fact, they will wonder how our generation ever got anything done in the first place. Hell, why go far? Even I wonder how I lived the first 22 years of my life without a mobile phone. My point is that what Dassault Systemes and SolidWorks are doing now may seem atrocious to people of our generation. But the generation that is in their nappies may very well be taught in history class that these companies were the pioneers that led a revolution. Either that or these companies tried to do something that was way ahead of their time and in the bargain made a billion dollar mistake. Either way, this is going to be an important part of history.