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2009 Issues Archive
19 August 2009
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Heads in the cloud
Software as a Service, with remote banks of computers running programs and storing data for key projects, is ready to bring its benefits to engineering.
Ben Sampson
reports
As the British summer’s obligatory rainclouds spoil our promised holiday season a cloud is gathering too over engineering firms. This cloud won’t spoil your BBQ but it does threaten to turn engineering software on its head and revolutionise the way thousands of companies run their businesses and carry out design.
The computing “cloud”, or Software as a Service (SaaS) as it is also known, has already spread over accountancy, sales, human resources and administration. Its next stop is engineering. The concept is simple and made possible by the improved speed and pervasiveness of the internet. Instead of running software and storing data on your own computer, all the work is done remotely on collections of powerful computers.
In a way, the cloud marks a return to the early days of computers, when large central mainframes would do the computational work, and people would access the mainframe through smaller client computers. There are several general advantages to the cloud: applications and data can be used from anywhere with internet access; your computer doesn’t have to be cutting edge; everyone uses the same version of software and updates are carried out easily; maintenance is easier; and more computationally intensive software can be run.
One of the first cloud applications available to engineering firms is enterprise resource planning (ERP). ERP can be thought of as a big database – a company-wide repository for all the information about the company’s functions and resources. That could be information about engineering, bills of material, scheduling, quality control, manufacturing process and flow.
West Midlands-based software company Ardent Solutions started offering its SaaS product, Ardent 24, in March to manufacturing firms. For a fixed monthly fee, Ardent will take ownership of your company’s hardware, infrastructure, application support, operating system licences, email and internet provision, virus checking and backup service. “The only thing you have to worry about,” says Jonathan Dawkins, managed services consultant at Ardent, “is whether or not your computer is switched on.”
Ardent has two clients up and running with Ardent 24 and another 30 in demonstration stage. These range from companies with 10 users to 250. “It’s not the norm yet but people expect it to become the norm. Customers want this now,” says Dawkins.
The recession is proving a strong catalyst for many firms to subscribe to the new service. Outsourcing IT in this way will almost certainly be cheaper than a company’s current set-up, says Dawkins. It also provides an opportunity to remove a company’s dependence on its IT department, some of which can “hold the rest of the company to ransom” with its provision of support and services, he says.
So an engineering company can now run all its departments, even the IT department itself, in the cloud, apart from one noteworthy exception: the engineering department. The problem here, says Dawkins, is the complex nature of what is going on. “Something like a CAD application is very intensive and has a very large amount of client activity. The problem would be the limitations of the hardware and connectivity and what you have to do to cope with that.”
A UK firm leads the way and is beating the big software vendors to the punch with the provision of a cloud-based engineering design service. Since it was launched last year, Dezineforce has managed to attract several “big name” clients, including consultancy Arup, which started using the software last autumn, and aerospace company the Hyde Group. Dezineforce has ambitious plans to add around 100 clients in the next 12 months and “hundreds more” in two to three years. It estimates the total size of the UK market for its service to be around 4,000 firms. The biggest markets are abroad – Germany, Japan and the US.
Clients sign up in a similar way to a mobile phone tariff, paying by the hour, either on a prepay or pay-monthly basis. The business model, as well as the company name, is based on successful SaaS company salesforce.com, which provides sales management software over the internet.
Salesforce streams its CRM application, previously only available to install locally, over the internet. In a similar vein you might expect Dezineforce simply to be offering the use of simulation tools through an internet browser. But, as I discovered when I visited the Southampton-based start-up, it is not quite that straightforward. Peter Kelly, international sales manager for the company, explains: “Some people’s perception of engineering in the cloud is that they are going to run Ansys as they do on their desktop, remotely on a server,” he says.
“We provide more than that. It’s an interface to those tools in batch mode. Instead of writing scripts and files, setting variables and scheduling runs, you enter the information and press go. We do all of the scheduling, queueing, and produce the results.”
The data processing takes place on Dezineforce’s remotely located servers in the cloud and the data remains 100% the property of the user at all times. “It has to be at the client’s explicit request for us to ever see someone else’s data,” Kelly stresses. Crucially, there is no real-time streaming of applications over the internet – only the results are delivered, often only a few kilobytes of data. This means that the minimum requirement for hardware or internet connection speed is not restrictively high.
Dezineforce’s core offering is design optimisation software developed at Southampton University, which is integrated with the simulation tools from Ansys, MSC, Dassault and Oasys. If you can get your head around it this software effectively optimises the design optimisation process.
It achieves this by running a number of algorithms, which analyse the data using sampling, modelling and prediction methods.
The third part of Dezineforce’s service is the workflows. These are pre-determined step-by-step process flows that determine which software is used and in what order. A designer logs in to the website and the first thing he does is select a workflow template from a library, such as Catia to Patran to Nastran, coupled with optimisation techniques. If a template does not exist, Dezineforce will make it for you.
After selecting a template, the engineer uploads the existing data and inputs the variables for the project. The baffling array of variables normally available in simulation software are condensed into a single short form on the internet. The workflow runs and when complete the designer can access the results of the different simulations, displayed in various forms: in graphs, columns and tables of numbers. The company calls this the “decision support” stage. The designer can investigate different results, adapt designs, rerun simulations, check into the fine detail of results and download designs and results.
Kelly says the fact the service is “on demand” is proving attractive to firms: “You can sign up today and log in tomorrow and start. It’s an on-demand turbo boost to your analysis.
“We are removing the need to be an expert in a particular tool by coupling a number of expert tools together, and providing a front end interface that your average engineer can interface with,” he says.
Despite this, Dr Peter Collins, chief executive of the company, insists Dezineforce does not dumb down the design process. “To the designer this is the stuff that is important. Most designers are only interested in the relatively small number of variables that will affect the design the most,” he says. He also answers questions about the quality of the designs the optimisation software produces by leaning on the reputation of the established tools it integrates with.
“The decision is made with a tool that you trust. The software just points at the best performing design more quickly. The designer still decides the objective, the variables, the constraints and whether the best performing design is the one they want. He is still in control,” he says.
The two main benefits of the service, Collins says, are the reduction in time and costs it offers. Normally, simulation runs can take months to find the optimum design, as different variations are computed. He says their optimisation software massively reduces the number of simulation runs that have to be conducted to produce the optimal design. The access to high-performance computing clusters also reduces run-time and lowers the cost barrier that prohibits many smaller companies from using simulation software.
He says: “A conventional software licence doesn’t give you a computing cluster to run software on, it doesn’t buy you the IT support to keep it running. The SaaS delivery model gives you access to all of that per project or per unit of time. “
Furthermore, he says, the use of workflows eliminates the need for designers to conduct pre- and post-processing of data, freeing their time to judge the merits of different designs, which is what their expertise should be in.
“This is an integrated suite of tools which works the whole engineering design process more efficiently. It collapses design cycles from a year to three months, from three months to a fortnight,” he says. “A number of SaaS offerings just give people access to one tool. But the engineering design process is a complex multi-stage process. Our solution mirrors that whole process and is delivered using SaaS.”
The optimisation software and web service has been developed over 10 years, initially for structural analysis, flow analysis, kinematics and impact analysis. The development team
is now looking to integrate optics modelling, then will look at applications such as electromagnetics, molecular modelling and biomechanics.
“We believe we are the first to offer the cloud in the design engineering space, but, inexorably, this is where all software capability delivery is going,” says Collins.
■
For more information go to
www.dezineforce.com
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© PE Publishing, 19 August 2009
