Press release - January 30, 2023

CIMdata highlights the benefits of CONTACT’s cloud offering

According to the independent experts of the international consulting and market research company CIMdata, CONTACT Cloud combines the strengths of the modular Elements platform with the advantages of today’s cloud technology. Companies benefit from ready-to-use PLM applications with a high degree of customizability. 

Companies increasingly rely on PLM solutions from the cloud. A study from 2021¹ revealed that 66% of the surveyed enterprises using on-premises solutions were considering a change to the cloud. Analysts at the consulting and market research company CIMdata now took a close look at CONTACT Software’s cloud offering. Their conclusion: it provides companies with easy scalability, high data security, as well as low initial investments and maintenance efforts. For example, through automated updates. “This greatly reduces the IT management burden on industrial companies, ceding resources that can support more strategic investments,” argue the experts.

In the cloud, customers use CONTACT Elements either as “Software as a Service” (SaaS) or “Platform as a Service” (PaaS). While SaaS offers full enterprise functionality in a standardized solution, PaaS allows companies to combine the advantages of the cloud with the customizability of on-premises operation. For CIMdata, the ability to flexibly switch between operating modes is a decisive advantage of the CONTACT Cloud. 

The cloud instances are provisioned, monitored, and secured by CONTACT. Data is stored on servers of the market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS), where it is protected from unauthorized access and available worldwide. “While security concerns about the cloud might cause hesitation, in fact cloud implementations done right are much more secure than any on-premise installation,” the analysts emphasize. 

According to CIMdata, an increasing number of companies plan to implement a hybrid or multi-cloud approach, where they use various cloud providers for their installations, optionally combined with on-premises operation. This is where CONTACT’s containerization strategy comes into play. The applications of CONTACT Elements are contained in self-sufficient software packages which can be run in any environment – making them ideal for possible deployment on other cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure or Google. 

The CIMdata commentary is available here.

¹ CIMdata, Cloud-Saas Adoption in PLM, May 12, 2021.