Four Reasons “Cloud-First” Engineering Makes Companies More Competitive

The race to bring new, innovative electronic products to market never slows down. The complexity of the projects involved keeps increasing, so many companies employ a worldwide engineering workforce.

At first, companies built huge server farms to facilitate the sharing of valuable tools and data among engineering team members. These huge server farms became IT management issues, with competing design teams requesting additional server capabilities and complaining when the servers were in use elsewhere. Server demands changed depending on where each team was in the design cycle, further complicating the IT department’s ability to provide the right services at the right time.

In the last decade, companies have met this usage challenge by purchasing time on cloud-based servers that they don’t have to manage themselves. The largest EDA companies now offer cloud services to meet prime-time demand.

Fast-moving teams must flexibly deploy best-in-class design technologies in the most efficient manner. Cloud-based server offerings have matured as companies requested simplified processes for getting the cloud resources they need when they need them.

We’re finally at the point where companies can adopt a “cloud-first” approach for design and analysis solutions that can be accessed anywhere from any device. What’s required for a “cloud-first” approach?

• An e-commerce offering that enables instant success for customers to purchase, launch, and use products in a matter of minutes. The platform must eliminate traditional software purchasing overhead.
• An offering targeted at those with limited infrastructure or resources but who require advanced design and system analysis solutions.
• A platform that allows users to subscribe to their preferred consumption-based usage models based on design needs and projected project durations, delivering the flexibility required to address increased workloads and schedule pressures.
• A platform partner, such as Amazon Web Services, that can scale to enable tens of thousands of users to work in secure environments.

While this “cloud-first” approach is particularly appealing to small and medium-sized businesses with limited IT resources, it also works for large corporations with agile engineering teams whose changing requirements often exceed the capacity of the company’s IT department.

How can a “cloud-first” approach make companies more competitive? There are four significant ways:

• No waiting for new IT infrastructure to be installed. The tools required are immediately available, on demand. Projects don’t stall waiting for the tools and resources required.
• No requirement to maintain infrastructure for tools no longer being used by the design team. Many tools are specific to a particular part of the design cycle.
• No need to buy and maintain the server farms in-house. The servers are all in the cloud, maintained by the web hosting company and engineering tool company.
• No need to develop the worldwide network infrastructure to support a dispersed workforce.

Today’s cloud-based design approaches have solved the issues that initially stopped companies from using the cloud. Security is assured. Availability is almost instant. And the costs are generally much less than maintaining the services in-house.

Cadence now offers Cadence OnCloud, a scalable platform offering instant access and flexible consumption models to accelerate innovation from chip design to systems. For more information on our OnCloud offerings, look at these resources:

• Cadence OnCloud SaaS and e-Commerce Platform, the Next Step of Cadence’s Cloud Journey
• Introducing Cadence OnCoud with Free Trial
• Cadence Extends Cloud Leadership with Transformational Cadence OnCloud SaaS and e‑Commerce Platform