Corporate

Life in the SaaS lane with Teamcenter X

By Scott Salzwedel

As the digital transformation swings into full gear, we are quickly seeing those who will succeed in the digital world – and those who will fall behind.

One way to ensure a successful digital transformation is to move all – or at least some – of your operations to the cloud. Software as a Service (SaaS) is revolutionizing industry today. Keep in mind that SaaS is not just for the large, established, global players. Small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) along with the mom-and-pop startups are equally interested in SaaS.

Regardless of industry. Regardless of size. Regardless of obstacles – businesses around the globe are moving to a SaaS strategy.

And that’s where Siemens comes in.

Siemens and AWS bring state-of-the-art SaaS solutions to the marketplace

The strategic collaboration between Siemens and Amazon Web Services (AWS) brings exclusive products and services to the table and removes the traditional barriers a business might encounter when transitioning to a digital enterprise. Many top industrial software solutions from Siemens are now available as SaaS offerings optimized for AWS – and that includes the leading PLM software Teamcenter, now as a SaaS offering called “Teamcenter X.”

Teamcenter X on the AWS infrastructure handles the burden of operating, managing and securing operations throughout the entire PLM environment. This is a critical advantage as it frees organizations to be more innovative, agile and creative. Teams can focus on what they were hired to do. In fact, teams across the organization are “free to create without limits.”

A few highlights of Teamcenter X include:

SaaS – the fast track to digital transformation: Built-in best practices and reduced cost of ownership allows teams to get up and running in the cloud quickly. All operations, maintenance and updates are performed by Siemens and AWS.

Grows with you: Teamcenter X delivers the full Teamcenter PLM portfolio. Get started with what you need right now and add more users or capabilities when you’re ready.

Resides on a secure cloud platform: The Teamcenter X platform is always up to date, ensuring the highest levels of protection for data, while enhancing an organization’s operational resilience. By leveraging the Teamcenter X secure cloud infrastructure, users reduce energy usage and lower their carbon footprint, making it a sustainable choice that aligns with an organization’s environmental goals.

The Siemens and AWS collaboration presents one of the easiest ways to transition operations to the cloud. Imagine what the partnership between a top global tech company and the leading cloud services provider could do for you.

The value-add of AWS Cloud

Because Teamcenter X is hosted on AWS Cloud, there are substantial advantages Siemens, AWS and Siemens and AWS together can offer:

-Shattering the “lack of security” myth: There’s often some resistance among customers (especially SMBs) when moving operations to the cloud because of where sensitive data will be stored. AWS security is always a top priority. In fact, AWS Cloud has been architected to be the most flexible and secure cloud computing environment on the market today. The AWS core infrastructure is built to satisfy the secure requirements for defense, global banks and other high sensitivity organizations. AWS service offerings and associate supply chains are vetted and accepted as secure for top secret operability.

AWS security services and solutions are focused on delivering four key strategic benefits critical
to implementing and operating an optimal security landscape.

-Hackers be afraid… Be very afraid: Scammers, phishers or any person with malicious intent can usually find a server somewhere to hack whether it’s in the cloud or on-prem. AWS has a dedicated team of engineers and investigators who build algorithms and mechanisms to proactively detect and prevent misuse of all cloud services. It’s a 24/7 operation and AWS responds quickly whenever a suspicious activity is brought to their attention.

-Resiliency like you’ve never seen before: AWS offers unprecedented resiliency on the cloud because the entire infrastructure is managed by AWS services. This infrastructure comprises hardware, software, networking and facilities. The AWS Global cloud infrastructure is designed to enable customers to build highly resilient workload architectures. Also, each AWS region is fully isolated and consists of multiple availability zones. Availability zones isolate faults that could impact workload resilience, preventing a fault from impacting other zones in the same region. All zones in an AWS region are interconnected with high-bandwidth and low-latency networking on fully redundant dedicated fiber. This in turn, provides high-throughput, low-latency networking between availability zones. All traffic between zones is encrypted.

-Reliability you can count on: One of the pillars of the AWS well-architected framework is reliability – the ability for any workload to perform its intended function correctly and consistently. Some of the built-in design principles to ensure business reliability include: automatically recovering from failure; scaling horizontally to increase aggregate workload availability; and measured capacity when needed. This last principle addresses a common cause of failure and on-premises workloads, which is resource saturation when the demands placed on a workload exceed the capacity of that workload. Users can monitor demand and workload utilization and automate the addition or removal of resources.

-Agility to grow and succeed: AWS allows customers to quickly ramp-up resources as needed. Manufacturers for example, can quickly develop and roll out new applications and teams can experiment and innovate more quickly and frequently. If an experiment fails, teams can always deprovision those resources without risk.

-Elasticity to tap into the power of the cloud: As mentioned earlier, in the past, customers used to overprovision IT infrastructure just to ensure that they had enough capacity to handle their business operations at peak activity level. This was often guesswork and required purchasing unused capacity. With AWS, users can provision what they actually need, knowing that they can instantly scale up or down with the needs of their business.

-Of course, cost savings in both ownership and in operations: AWS allows customers to trade capital expense for variable expense – users only pay for what they consume. With AWS, the variable expense is much lower than what SMBs can typically do themselves. Because of economies of scale, this especially aligned with manufacturers. AWS is moving fixed costs to variable costs – critical to keeping the operating model flexible relative to demand. SaaS not only gets users started fast, but also shifts the IT burden. With SaaS, Siemens takes the burden of managing the software, hardware, security, maintenance and even the upgrades/updates.   

Teamcenter X fueling the digital transformation!

With Teamcenter X, users simply choose the starting point to accelerate innovation and start their digital transformation. Teams have access to all the necessary tools to start immediately, covering all product lifecycle management needs.

Built into Teamcenter X are numerous preconfigured PLM solutions for all types of manufacturing from semiconductor and medical device manufacturers to individual component manufacturers. Prescriptive solutions are built into Teamcenter X to help businesses get started faster and compete with industry leaders.

Already customers are accelerating their digital transformation with Teamcenter X:   

Company Name: eNovates

Industry: E-mobility charging station manufacturing

Customer Challenge: Rapidly changing technologies, regulations and customer requirements in the EV market

Solution: A fully integrated software ecosystem was needed for improved file, release, product lifecycle and task management with solutions for mechanical, electrical and electronic design

Since we are growing rapidly, there is a need for structure in processes and tools. That is why we are currently implementing Teamcenter X.

– Stijn Vispoel, R&D Manager, eNovates


Company Name: Simple Energy

Industry: Electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer

Customer Challenge: A fast, flexible cloud deployment was needed that easily scales with company growth

Solution: Teamcenter X offered a strong digital foundation that serves all the company’s e-mobility solutions

“Siemens Teamcenter X, a cloud-based Product Lifecycle Management Software as a Service innovation platform, is the preferred choice for leading EV OEMs of the world.”

– Simple Energy


Tap into the proven success of the Siemens and AWS collaboration

These are indeed exciting times. And there’s no question the Siemens and AWS strategic collaboration is helping businesses and industries transform the everyday. And with a greater emphasis on sustainability in all facets of production and manufacturing, it makes even more sense to move to the cloud where SaaS offerings can have a significant and immediate impact on both the planet – and a company’s bottom line.

The collaboration between Siemens and AWS helps remove the perplexing barriers normally associated with design, build, manufacturing and sustainability. And now, with Teamcenter X, a powerful SaaS solution, companies have the means to jumpstart their PLM strategy.

Teamcenter X is just one of many solutions now available on AWS Marketplace. Visit the website to see all of Siemens cloud-based offerings and solutions.

And remember… all successful digital journeys begin in the SaaS lane!

Additional links:

Read the latest CIMdata white paper – “Powering the Cloud Journey: Siemens and AWS.” Among the latest findings, you’ll also learn about Teamcenter’s Carbon Footprint Calculator.

Want to learn more about the Siemens and AWS collaboration? Visit our blog site here.

Tired of waiting? Ready to try Teamcenter X? Start your free trial now!


Scott Salzwedel is a senior communications and technology writer for Siemens Digital Industries Software. In addition to blogs, Scott writes numerous articles, white papers, videos and various other types of communication relating to AWS and the digital transformation. He also created and hosted the podcast series “Talking Aerospace Today.”

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/aws/2023/07/24/life-in-the-saas-lane-with-teamcenter-x/