Cloud is making its way into manufacturing industry. I’ve been watching this process for the last 5-7 years and I can clearly say that position of manufacturing companies is changing. From “there is no way we trust cloud applications”, manufacturing companies are moving into a reality of using cloud services for different purposes – finance, CRM, sales, marketing.
You can ask what about engineering software? CAD and PLM vendors are in a full swing of cloud marketing, but cloud PLM adoption is far from what vendors are demanding. At least you can make such conclusion from the research announcements made by CIMdata.