Today is an exciting day for Siemens as we lay the foundation for the future of our software portfolio and for our community with the launch of Xcelerator as a Service (XaaS).
When we introduced Xcelerator – an integrated portfolio of engineering software, services and an application development platform that brings together the industry’s broadest and deepest technologies available to make our industrial customers’ digital transformation goals a reality – we blured the boundaries between engineering domains to help our customers speed digital transformation.
Xcelerator enables innovative product design and manufacturing via robust digital threads that ensures data is accessible when and where it is needed. Through a comprehensive digital twin, organizations optimize their products and processes throughout the lifecycle. While many companies claim to offer a digital twin, only Siemens has the toolset, domain knowledge and usage expertise to deliver the comprehensive digital twin with the fidelity and breadth that manufacturers need to thrive in a world of complexity and deliver the innovation that customers and the market demand.
Leading industry analysts, CIMdata, believes, "The Xcelerator portfolio provides the breadth and depth that manufacturing enterprises need to create a comprehensive, actionable digital twin and manage the complete product lifecycle from creation through production and service across a heterogeneous value chain."
The future of industry is in the cloud
In June, at Siemens Capital Market Day, our president and CEO, Tony Hemmelgarn joined the Siemens Managing Board and leadership team to announce our intention to transition the Siemens Digital Industries Software business to SaaS (Software as a Service). We are transitioning to this new business model to fundamentally rethink the way our technology generates value for our customers and how we use the cloud to make our solutions more accessible, more flexible, and more scalable than ever. We have spent considerable time talking with our community and have worked on our own technologies and developed our strategy to build something truly transformational – for Siemens and for our customers. We’re not simply adding a new user interface on top of existing tools, basic file sharing capabilities or moving limited desktop CAD functionality into the cloud. Instead, we’ve been focused on leveraging the cloud to deliver our industry-leading technology in new ways and to reduce the challenges of access, flexibility and scalability facing our customers today.
Say hello to Xcelerator as a Service
Today, we are expanding the Xcelerator portfolio with the introduction of Xcelerator as a Service (XaaS). Many of our recent in-house developments and acquisitions, including MindSphere, Mendix and Supplyframe, have laid the cloud-native foundation for our move to SaaS – and Xcelerator as a Service is how we are going to continue to deliver on that strategy.
Xcelerator as a Service will make the Xcelerator portfolio more accessible, enabling manufacturing organizations and their extended value-chains to have a single source of truth and the ability to tap into high-performance computing, at any time, from anywhere and on any device. Cloud-based services will remove the need for HPC hardware or in-house IT expertise and allow anyone to carry out compute-intensive tasks via a web browser – whether that’s advanced multi-physics simulation available to all or AI-driven generative engineering.
XaaS will offer need-based access to tools, features and compute resources organizations require, as they want them – via flexible and personalized solutions that offer instant productivity. Helping our customers achieve their goals with composable and configurable solutions while empowering individual users to shape their own workspace for maximum productivity is a core tenet of XaaS.
Manufacturing companies increasingly need to change the size of a team or manufacturing line, and with the increased scalability offered by XaaS, organizations can quickly adapt to market conditions and add capacity and capability when and where needed. This will allow both ad-hoc and established groups of stakeholders to together build and test products and processes with the most comprehensive digital twin - before investing in materials or equipment.
As we build capabilities and expand the offering, Xcelerator as a service will make new things possible for many types of companies. For example, a multinational automotive OEM will be able to use XaaS to increase collaboration across its globally distributed supply chain, through secure collaboration between internal and multi-tiered supplier led teams around the world. It can connect experts across engineering, simulation, manufacturing and production, with Mendix low-code capabilities to allow tailoring of the solution to meet specific needs.
Need to onboard a new supplier because they’ve got break through innovation? Share the data you need to, in a controlled and secure manner simply by typing in their e-mail address and letting the App handle the rest. Need that simulation workflow for your suspension sub-system wrapped up into a reusable, distributable and controllable application? We’ll provide the low-code tools for the FEA expert to do it without needing a programmer. Need to collaborate with your suppliers across the other side of the planet, in virtual reality, with data from other CAD systems? Strap on that headset and let’s get to work.
Or, consider an automotive startup that needs to make the jump from concept to deliverable market introduction. Xcelerator as a Service will enable this team to use a high-end product development toolset across mechanical design, electronics, software development and more but without requiring the IT infrastructure to support it, yet with access to the same toolset used by the world’s leading manufacturing organizations to build comprehensive digital twins, at a fraction of the cost, from anywhere, any time and on whatever device needed.
Working alongside a supplier in Shenzhen and need to tweak a CAD file, recut your molds to get those first parts off the tool? Fire up your browser, log into XaaS, collaborate with your peers and make those edits in a managed environment. Got your prototype units in the field and wondering what to do with the stream of data from built-in sensors? Take advantage of the most comprehensive digital twin toolset, grab that data and drive your simulation with real-world results and deliver further innovation, faster than the competition. What about mixing in a little artificial intelligence to help push that next generation further, explore hundreds of purely virtual tests based on real world data in the cloud? We call that generative engineering, and it could change how we design products.
While Xcelerator as a Service is new, Software as a Service is not new to Siemens. In addition to the foundational elements, Teamcenter X is a cloud-native solution now a core part of XaaS – it offers the world’s most widely used backbone PLM software, as a service, delivering instant-on cloud PLM for fast return on investment and the ability to scale as the organization grows.
Unique to XaaS is that it offers not only access to the Xcelerator portfolio, but to a broader community – with new opportunities to collaborate across the team, organization, and supply-chain. It will include learning environments and to a rapidly expanding marketplace for applications, software components and industry expertise.
Siemens Digital Industries Software is where today meets tomorrow, and with Siemens as trusted partner and adviser we hope, through XaaS, to enable our community to expand the boundaries of what they’re capable of, envision and build their own future. There is much more to come, so join us on this journey to a new digital future by following us on LinkedIn or Facebook or learning more about Xcelerator as a Service here.
