Although cloud computing is just starting to make its way into the manufacturing industry, I think the cloud holds great potential for the future of manufacturing software. And I don’t think the potential of the cloud is limited to the application.
Cloud development platforms – or Platform as a Service (PaaS) – stand to change the way that manufacturing software is developed, distributed and consumed. Because PaaS significantly lowers the barriers to entry to develop manufacturing applications, it makes it significantly cheaper and easier for third-party developers to create applications for manufacturing-specific problems.
If you’re unfamiliar with development platforms, just think about an iPhone. The iPhone is the platform that third-party developers build apps for. To develop for the iPhone, you just need to build an app on the iPhone platform and anyone in the world can download it directly to their iPhone. PaaS takes that and moves it to an enterprise level.