Cloud PLM and the Old Enterprise Trap

May 16, 2013

Enterprise software is a fascinating place these days. It comes in a different angles and perspective. The disruption of consumer technologies, cloud, BYOD and many other factors. We can see the influence coming from both technological and business factors. Few months ago, I posted – PLM, Viral Sales and Enterprise Old Schoolers. While enterprise sales is still a tricky game, lots of thing are going to change, in my view. The following webinar invitation just landed in my email box this morning – Cloud ERP, Myths, Reality and the Old ERP trap. Jim Brown is well known as an analyst in engineering, manufacturing and enterprise domains. He is also my long time blogging buddy and co-starring at Tech4PD Show. I hope to attend webinar tomorrow (sponsored by Plex system). I found the following passage from webinar introduction interesting:

"…how cloud ERP helps overcome financial and IT resource constraints that keep companies stuck on outdated ERP systems that don’t provide the information they need to make good, timely business decisions…"

Moving on, I found the following part of webinar promotion resonating with the way any cloud enterprise system (PLM included) can be introduced and adopted in enterprise organization. In general, I can see companies are trapped in existing enterprise systems. On average, any company invested millions of dollars implementing ERP, CRP and PLM systems. The following steps clearly can show a path how to get out of this "enterprise trap". Read the following bullets and let me know if it makes sense to me.

  • Understand cloud myths and realities.
  • Overcome real and imagined financial obstacles to better systems.
  • Break IT resource barriers.
  • Rely on agile, speedy, flexible solutions that are accessible from anywhere 24/7.
  • Improve visibility across your entire enterprise.
  • Hear real-life success stories from manufacturers who made the move to cloud ERP.

Enterprise systems are complex and required time and effort to understand and implement. This is true for enterprise CRP, ERP, PLM and other systems. At the same time, enterprises and manufacturing companies are asking these how to break the limit of existing software models and barriers. Many companies are looking for alternative models. Helping them to understand cloud technology better, can be beneficial from both sides.

What is my conclusion? Slowly, but surely, enterprise companies are coming to understanding of what role cloud systems can play in the future enterprise software eco-system. To bring unlimited resources, cut implementation cost, improve level of visibility and collaboration – this is only a short list and starting point IT will use on the way out of old enterprise trap. It will take time and resources, but we will come there. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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How Amazon helps cloud PLM to connect to enterprise data?

April 16, 2013

Face it, even cloud is trending and growing fast, on enterprise premise systems are representing a major part of engineering and manufacturing systems in organizations. It includes ERP, CRM, PDM, PLM systems as well as zillions of Excels and CAD files. I’ve been thinking how to optimize cloud/on-premise data co-existance. My attention was caught by the news about Amazon Storage Gateway. Amazon, in its push to draw more enterprise customers, had to make sure the Amazon Storage Gateway will run in Microsoft Hyper-v virtualized shops. Which expands the ability of Amazon to synchronize data between cloud and on premise environment.

For those of you not familiar with ASG (Amazon Storage Gateway), navigate to the following link to learn more. The AWS Storage Gateway supports two configurations:

1/ Gateway-Cached Volumes: You can store your primary data in Amazon S3, and retain your frequently accessed data locally. Gateway-Cached volumes provide substantial cost savings on primary storage, minimize the need to scale your storage on-premises, and retain low-latency access to your frequently accessed data.

2/ Gateway-Stored Volumes: In the event you need low-latency access to your entire data set, you can configure your on-premises gateway to store your primary data locally, and asynchronously back up point-in-time snapshots of this data to Amazon S3. Gateway-Stored volumes provide durable and inexpensive off-site backups that you can recover locally or from Amazon EC2 if, for example, you need replacement capacity for disaster recovery.

The two options are representing an interesting option on how enterprise data can co-exist between cloud and on-premise environments. I can see mid-size companies are doing it to optimize their file storages. Larger companies can use it for extended value chain communication.

What is my conclusion? As cloud systems will expand in organizations, the demand for hybrid environment will grow as well. Companies won’t be able to migrate enterprise data assets outside of organizations fast, therefore cloud PLM solutions that will be able to communicate and co-exist in hybrid deployments will grow. The ability to connect existing enterprise data assets and cloud apps is a key to make future cloud expansion. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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CAD, PLM and Future Cloud File Systems

April 8, 2013

Cloud is everywhere these days. It becomes a mainstream in our everyday life and it is coming to businesses and enterprises. Emails, photos, social networks, mobile apps… Cloud services and applications are destroying old paradigms and create new ones. One of the most powerful paradigm we developed for the last 20-30 years is folders and files. I’ve been discussing it in the past and want to get back to this topic again. You can navigate to few of my previous posts – PLM User Experience and The Evil of Folders and The Future of CAD without Files?

One of the most popular concepts of past 3-5 years was development of apps. The idea of Apps replacing everything got viral. Many people thought that apps are going to replace everything (including files and folders). I’ve been reading an interesting publication over the weekend – The Death Of The File System: What You Need To Know. The author is discussing the reason why folders and files systems will remain even after we move to the cloud. Here is an interesting passage.

No file system is a no-go. This is the deepest analysis I’ve found of a vision of a future in which "users simply have apps” and are not conscious of storage repositories. And it doesn’t bode well for workplace users. We may need new UX paradigms. Via JohnnyHolland: “Documents associated with them appear magically. Presto.” While this might sound like some kind of user experience utopia, I have a grave concern that eliminating a file system in this manner misses a huge audience. Us. While opening Pages to work on the family newsletter might make sense for casual home users of a computer system, it does not make sense in a professional context. In the professional world, we work on projects. Projects are composed of many different types of files. And yes, we might have the same apps open all day, but do we want to be forced to duplicate a hierarchy of information in every single application? No. Besides, “projects” are just one type of organizational scheme. As a user experience designer, I’ve seen a lot of professionals in other fields organizing a lot of stuff in a lot of different ways. So even attempts at inter-app organization around the concept of a project, such as Microsoft’s Project Center, are not effective replacements for an infinitely flexible organization scheme like simple folders.

The idea of new UX cloud paradigm emulating folders and files behavior resonates. It eliminates many problems and the biggest one – the need of customers to adopt to something new. Customers will continue to use existing paradigm and some of them even didn’t pay attention how they switch from proven file/folders environment to cloud storage.

The development of cloud platforms is going in parallel. Companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft and some others are spending billions of dollars building infrastructure transferring the data to the cloud. Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive, Apple iCloud – this is only a short list of services emulating cloud files/folders and allowing to us to store a conventional data (eg. files and folders) in the cloud. Navigate to the following article – Google Drive adds apps folders and customer properties for developers to learn about latest Google extension in that field.

The app data folder serves as a hidden storage space that developers can use to store configuration files and other important app data that shouldn’t be changed by the user. Files stored within an app data folder are hidden from both the user and from other apps. Only your app can see what is stored within this location. It prevents other apps from taking information from your files and also stops users from accidentally deleting core app files.

Google and other cloud infrastructure providers are making their cloud platforms fully transparent and available to store engineering data – CAD files, Excels, etc. CAD/PLM vendors are also working in the same direction. A good example – Autodesk 360 provides a convenient way to store files and other application data.

What is my conclusion? File system dead, long live "Cloud File System". I can see two potential trends related to the development of new cloud-based file systems and storage. First is related to existing applications – with the increased transparency of cloud file storage, I can see a renaissance of existing CAD applications in the cloud. It still hard to predict dynamic and interest, but I can clearly see how existing vendors will be trying to re-use it anyway. Second trend is related to establishment of new native cloud design systems (eg. Autodesk Fusion 360 or long time promised Solidworks Mechanical Conceptual). These systems will provide apps (or webapps), but will keep data (file) storage system transparrent. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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PLM Cloud and Open Source Coopetition

March 25, 2013

I want to continue the theme of disruption started in my post last week. I can see two major forces that will disrupt traditional PLM approach nowadays – cloud and open source. Both have some strong position points and some weaknesses. I put some of my thoughts about cloud and open source disruption last year – PLM cloud and open source disruptive trajectories. I want to get back to this topic. I was reading TechCrunch article- Oracle Is Bleeding At The Hands Of Database Rivals. Read the article. It clearly influenced by recent Oracle financial results announcement. Nevertheless, I found some facts and opinions there very important and interesting. Here is my favorite passage:

Until this past week, the extent of Oracle’s problems were not known. But there is a cut, a slight bleeding that’s now visible. But how deep is the cut? How much is Oracle really bleeding? That’s exactly the question analysts asked in a Reuters story after the earnings results: “Data base revenue, which has been the cash machine of the company, has changed. There are now alternative databases, as well as the cloud,” said Mark Moerdler, an analyst at Bernstein Research. “That pressure is still a tiny bleed, but it is out there and the question is – is it bigger than we think it is?”

Another interesting case built around solutions and databases built on top of open source. One of them mentioned in the article is Datastax – outfit providing solutions based on open source database Casandra. Here is the quote:

Oracle reported this week that new software licenses are down two percent. And that decline is in part reflected by the adoption of NoSQL databases offered by Datastax and a variety of other services that use in-memory technology at the database layer. The reason for the drop has more to do with the enterprise acceptance of online applications more than anything else, said Datatastax CEO Billy Bosworth in an interview last week. That’s the truth. NEA Ventures Scott Sandell said to me at SXSW that CIOs are convinced to move their workloads but cloud security is still an issue. That’s where companies like Datastax enter the picture. Datastax is built on Cassandra, a high performance Apache open-source database technology with security at its core.

TechCrunch’s article made me think about influence of open source and cloud solutions in PLM market and the potential to provide solution alternatives to customers looking how to get a different PLM implementations. I can see many customers are moving to the cloud. A particular segment of customers might be interesting to find an alternative, but still struggle with the justification of their security procedures can be changed to adopt open source solutions that can provide them alternative licensing models and optimized cost. However, the most interesting is a combination of both approaches. Even if open source and cloud might sounds as orthogonal approach, business combination can be interesting.

What is my conclusion? It is an interesting time in enterprise and PLM market specifically these days. Changes are coming from all directions. Technological disruption and new business models are coming across interests of customers to find alternatives to existing PLM solutions. The primary focus of customers is flexible solution, fast ROI and reliable solution framework for the future. The coopetition of cloud and open source can play an interesting role and become a game changing factor. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Will enterprise PLM embrace hybrid cloud?

February 15, 2013

Cloud is trending and we can see more examples of how cloud technologies applies in business. PLM vendors are not standing aside from the cloud. You may see different ways PLM companies are developing their cloud PLM strategies. It starts from public cloud offering coming from Autodesk PLM 360 and Arena and ends up with Siemens PLM Teamcenter leveraging IaaS, Windchill hosted by IBM and Dassault Enovia presenting their solutions as "online system".

What is important is to look on customer realities these days. Let’s face the facts. Almost every manufacturing company these days have a significant amount of enterprise software deployed in house. The larger company you go, you discover more enterprise system managed by company IT. While cloud can be promising opportunity, co-existence of public cloud systems and existing IT can become a problem and impact the speed of cloud deployments and developments. In such context, development of "hybrid clouds" can become an interesting option, in my view.

Earlier today, my attention was caught by Rackspace article – Rackspace Study: The Case for Hybrid cloud. Rackspace is a growing outfit specialized in hosting and cloud infrastructure. Read the article and make your opinion. The following passage explains in a nutshell the idea:

One big trend that has gained considerable momentum with these large organizations is the use of hybrid clouds, which is basically the usage of cloud from an IaaS provider alongside other platforms in order to deliver an application or workload to several users. Hybrid clouds bring a number of different advantages to enterprises, such as the ease of spinning resources up and down , and the cost efficiency of being able to pay for the capacity on an hourly or monthly basis instead of being tied down to a specific billing plan. What’s even better is that it allows for the greatest flexibility when the virtualization technology vendors started offering built in support for moving live virtual machines across a network, as it allows a straightforward means of transitioning applications and workloads between sites.

Take a look on a picture below. Rackspace is building a case for the multi-site hybrid cloud. Here is the explanation provided by Rackspace:

rackspace-hybrid-cloud1.png

Rackspace defines a multi-site hybrid cloud is one that involves attaching existing IT infrastructure to a public cloud provider via a private leased line or a public internet connection. The main advantage to a hybrid cloud is that it allows existing infrastructure, including legacy hardware and code that are otherwise expensive and disruptive to replace. However, this doesn’t come without a catch, as it greatly limits control over geography and may result in increased latency as distance between sites increase, not to mention includes additional time and expense meant for provisioning network connections and reliability of inter-site communication, when compared to pure cloud implementations.

I found this idea interesting. Every IT in a large organization is looking how to optimize cloud deployment without disrupting the existing IT servers rooms. Hybrid cloud can be a good solution for that. Another aspect is security. In my view, hybrid cloud can provide some advantages to IT and large companies to keep some their servers more protected.

What is my conclusion? IT is a blocker to cloud technologies in many companies these days. Even if IT understands the value of the cloud technologies, it provides too much disruption to existing IT infrastructure and future strategies. So, Rackspace is spot on. Hybrid cloud can be a potential way to mitigate a potential concerns of IT about public cloud. Note to companies looking for PLM solutions. While public cloud can provide a clear strategic advantage in terms of resource optimiaztion, Hybrid cloud can be an interesting option and intermediate steps towards exploration of cloud technologies for larger manufacaturing firms. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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What Cloud CAD-PDM Hybrid Means for PLM?

February 10, 2013

To predict future is tough. Not many people are trying to do so. Especially in tech. Companies are juggling with buzzwords, powerpoints and software. At the same time, analysts are trying to swim into the social information stream of provocations, facts and opinions. There are two terms in manufacturing and product development software that created most of confusion for the last decade – PDM and PLM. Navigate to the following link to find lots of publications about the topic. To my taste, the topic PDM vs. PLM became boring. I’d even suggest to add it to the list of boring PLM topics introduced by Jos Voskuil.

However, here is some news. My blogging buddy and analyst Chad Jackson is predicting PDM revolution. Navigate your browser to read about future PDM Revolution. Chad’s take on PDM revolution smells cloud and two new cloud design systems – Fusion 360 and SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual. This is my favorite passage that summarizes Chad’s crystal ball prediction of Hands-Free PDM:

If you take a look at Fusion 360 and Solidworks Mechanical Conceptual, at least in my exposure to it, there’s no step where you explicitly save your design or model. It’s done automatically in the background. When you close your model? The latest version will be there when you return. What happens when you create variations on a design that amounts to branching? Look at the model history and you’ll see those various branches tracked for you. So if you think about it, it is essentially hands-free. It does the brunt of the work automatically and practically invisibly for you.

Sounds like revolution to you? I think yes. However, here is a deal. It impose a significant threat to the future implementations of PLM. The mess of data in your local CAD-PDM now moves to the next step of the product development. Until now, companies implementing PDM took an advantages of their PLM solutions from the same vendors to manage BOM and ECO processes integrated with CAD data. Cloud CAD systems are not there yet and probably will not be there. Integration becomes an imperative to make hands-free PDM successful.

What is my conclusion? Cloud CAD and hands-free PDM is a signal to think about BOM management. In a different way. They key words are "single" and "integrated". Without that, we will enter into the messy world of structure mapping and synchronizations. If you are vendor, you need to think about openness and web APIs. If you are a potential customer of a cloud CAD/PDM hybrid, ask vendors how flexible and granular is "save" function that turns your work into stream of information stored in database. The ugly truth is that until now, file structure was doing integration job for you. Not any more. It is gone. Forever. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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IaaS, Cloud PLM and Disruptive Pricing

January 18, 2013

PLM vendors are continuing to adopt cloud. I can clearly see a difference between people attitude for cloud solutions now and 4 years ago. Here is my simplistic definition of changes that happened for the last 4 years. The following sequence represents a typical reaction on "cloud PLM" for the last 4 years. 2009: What is cloud? 2010: Why I need cloud? 2011: Why not to use cloud? 2012: How to use cloud?

The last question, actually, has multiple angles. It means all – technology, implementation, product licenses and finally pricing model. The last one is obviously important and I can see some interesting dynamics between cloud and on premise software in coming years. The following Infoworld article caught my attention – Oracle’s faux IaaS now gets faux on-demand cloud pricing by David Linthicum. Take a read. I found it interesting. Oracle is a king of enterprise software market has a lot to lose when it comes to cloud adoption. I found the following passage the most interesting:

Oracle’s "on-demand private cloud" isn’t merely an equipment lease either. It’s an odd hybrid created because Oracle finds itself stuck between the rock and the cloud, reluctant to devalue its hugely lucrative enterprise software products by folding into cloud-service pricing. The rise of cloud computing very much goes against Oracle’s highly profitable way of doing business: enterprise license agreements, maintenance contracts, and all the other trappings of big software.

2013 is perhaps the first year where Oracle will feel real pain from public cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, and Google, as well as emerging private cloud providers such as Eucalyptus and those based on OpenStack or CloudStack.

I made me think more about what happens in PLM vendors ecosystem. Traditional PLM vendors (Siemens PLM, PTC and Dassault) are selling premium lucrative enterprise oriented packages with a lot of functionality and value behind that. Autodesk is a newbie of PLM market is playing "cloud alternative game" with SaaS prices and less functionality out of the box. Aras Corp. is providing Aras Innovator using disruptive enterprise open source. I can see some similarities in the attempts of traditional PLM vendors to embrace cloud technology and delivery models. You can see how Aras position their solution as "true cloud" with all advantages of cloud and on premise software. Aras leverages Microsoft Azure platform. Navigate to this link to read more. Siemens PLM introduced TeamCenter IaaS option delivery few months ago. I wasn’t able to get information about IaaS and cloud prices for both Aras and TeamCenter. Both website provided contact option to request the price, but no price.

What is my conclusion? Cloud plays a disruptive roles these days in many markets. Enterprise software is one of them. We can see an interesting combination of vendors, IT and infrastructure providers plays. IaaS vendors will keep existing technological platforms afloat by providing a seamless cloud infrastructure environment to support existing server-client and web technologies. Oracle is a good demo how vendor can reposition and tailor technology model to new conditions. I think, we will see lots of "cloud innovation" from traditional PLM providers in a near future. For a long run, cost matters. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image courtesy of [Stuart Miles] / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Who will clone existing PLMs to the cloud?

December 20, 2012

The discussion about PLM and cloud is moving to the levels where "details become important". In my view, many customers today are moving from "why cloud?" to "how we can leverage cloud?" type of questions. Cloud has many faces. In my previous blog post – PLM and the diversity of cloud options, I discussed how multiple cloud deployment options can be used for PLM – IaaS, PaaS, SaaS. Different PLM vendors are choosing different strategies. Here are some examples – TeamCenter is choosing IaaS, Aras decided for PaaS and Autodesk PLM360 is SaaS.

PLM industry is coming to the cloud with the a heavy baggage of technologies and products developed for the last 15-20 years. The existing PLM products and amount of customer investments into PLM program can raise valid questions about how to leverage these assets in the cloud. I’ve been reading TechCrunch article about CloudVelocity startup – CloudVelocity Launches With $5M From Mayfield To Bring The Hybrid Cloud To The Enterprise. Here is the interesting passage:

Users can discover, blueprint, clone, and migrate applications between data centers and public clouds. Currently, CloudVelocity supports full server, networking, security and storage integration with AWS but plans to integrate other public clouds, such as RackSpace in 2013. The beta trial of the Developer Edition cloud cloning software allows users to clone multi- tier app clusters and services, without modification into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 cloud. The Enterprise Edition enables users to clone, migrate and failover multi-tier apps and services into the AWS EC2 cloud.

The article made me think more about hybrid cloud and opportunity to expand existing PLM implementations to the cloud. Imagine, you can clone your existing PLM implementation and move it to AWS or RackSpace cloud? It allows you to build a secured environment to expand your PLM deployment into additional services. Here is a possible example. Many companies have BOM management implementation done as part of basic PDM/PLM programs. Future expansion of these services to NPI or Service Management requires additional resources and global availability. By "cloning" existing BOM management implementation to the cloud you can future expand to additional services.

However, I can see potential problems too. Many PDM/PLM environments have tight connections with desktop CAD applications. How to clone these environments to the cloud? This is a good question to ask.

What is my conclusion? The interest of customers to leverage cloud is growing. Still, many customers see cloud is a potential to implement something that they cannot do today with traditional PLM programs. Sometimes it is infrastructure limitations such as global deployment and sometimes it is related to cost implied into growing PLM deployment. I can see a growing opportunity to provide a technology enabling "to clone" existing PLM program to the cloud with future growth. It can be interesting option. So, dear PLM developers, somebody will clone you tomorrow in the cloud. What do you think about that? Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image courtesy of [Victor Habbick] / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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How to prevent PLM cloud from buying experience complexity?

December 17, 2012

Experience is one of the most popular words in tech these days. CAD and PLM vendors are part of this journey as well. I would like to talk about "buying experience". For many customers, enterprise software experience is actually starts from the moment company needs to make a decision what product (software) configuration to buy. PLM and other enterprise software price lists are well known by the complexity. Many products, options, configurations. In many cases, the final decision about the desired configuration of software package can be taken after the evaluation and pilot implementation. Very often, consulting and/or service company needs to be hired to help in software configuration choice.

Opposite to enterprise on premise software, cloud or SaaS software is coming with the model that supposed to simplify the decision process. Especially, when it comes to the buying decision. For many SaaS software companies, the simplification of buying process is one of the most critical elements to success. The configuration of SaaS product is combined from few options like the following one for Salesforce.com. I’m sure you can come with more examples like that.

Over the weekend, my attention was caught by the following article in ReadWriteWeb Enterprise – Cloud Complexity Clouts Enterprise Customers. Author speaks about complication of Amazon Web Service cloud – experience gathered from recent re:Invent conference. One of the sessions of the conference was completely dedicated to… billing. I found the following passage quite interesting:

The billing session came as a bit of a shock. One Apache OpenCloud committer who did not wish to be identified summed it up best: "If you have to have a session on billing, you’re doing it wrong."… It’s a valid argument, because while one should rightfully expect all levels of interest to be addressed at a trade show’s first run, it seems that something like billing for cloud services should be pretty simple and not in need of tutoring. This kind of complexity raises serious questions about the real value of using a public vs. private cloud in the enterprise.

I see the potential of PLM cloud to get infected with the "complexity disease". It can be easy inherited from on-premise PLM portfolios. It can also come from some examples of cloud complexity like the one above. This is a very dangerous trajectory. In my view, cloud software is all about easy experience – buying, starting to use, expanding. Vendors need to be focus how to get customers involved and make a decision fast. Renewal of the service is another key element of success. Complex buying experience and complex paying experience (including billing) won’t help cloud solutions to expand their positions in organizations.

What is my conclusion? The simplification is one of the most strongest trends today. It goes everywhere. Buying experience is one of the most critical elements, since it is one of the first interaction with vendor and software customer may have when he starts adopting a service. It is also critical from the standpoint of understanding software ROI. If you cannot understand your software bill, you most probably will have a problem to calculate ROI too. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image courtesy of [pakorn] / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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How BoxCryptor can solve CAD cloud concerns?

December 16, 2012

The simplicity of DropBox and similar cloud based file storage makes it very attractive to many people. Engineers are not an exclusion from the list. The discussion about "Dropbox and PLM" is on going already long time. I posted about some interesting dropbox usage patterns few weeks ago here. As you can read from the article, engineers are placing files to the Dropbox. The problem of security is clearly identified these days. So, to see a startup trying to solve this problem should not surprised you much. That’s what I felt when my attention was caught by BoxCryptor for Dropbox. Still in alpha version, but promising … Here is how BoxCryptor CEO Andrea Wittek explains what they do:

According to BoxCryptor CEO Andrea Wittek, the benefit of that would become apparent if you happen to want to download and decrypt something using someone else’s machine. I can also see the feature coming in handy for Chrome OS business users, down the line at least. “We call it an alpha version,” Wittek told me. “We’ve been testing it for a while. We definitely recommend people try it, though we wouldn’t recommend it for very sensitive files. It can crash – the worst thing that can happen is you think it’s encrypted a file and it hasn’t.”

Watch the following video demo how BoxCryptor works.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=iC4_zTjwYPk

What is my conclusion? Security is number #1 concern to adopt many cloud-based solutions. At the same time, you cannot stop new technologies. Access is one of the big advantages of the cloud. I can expect more companies will try to crack cloud-security problem and find innovative ways to share files in secured manner. The prize is huge – seamless access of files plus simplicity of Dropbox. For engineers, BoxCryptor can be a very attractive solution to share files with suppliers and remotely located design partners. This is only partial list. I’m sure you will come with more use cases. I’d be glad to read more about your experience with Dropbox file sharing.

Best, Oleg

Image courtesy of [Renjith Krishnan] / FreeDigitalPhotos.net


[tag CAD, Cloud, Files, Dropbox, Security]

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