Siemens Nx on the Cloud and Licensing

[DavidDEC]

Right now I'm in the process of becoming a freelance design engineer using Siemens NX, and have some plans of expanding in the future to creating a small company.
So one of my main concerns right now is the relatively high price (from the point of view of a small entrepeneur) of NX licenses.

Yesterday I came accross this article about Turkish Aerospace Industries deploying Siemens NX in a private cloud environment:

http://www.plm.automation.siemens.c...se.cfm?Component=222055&ComponentTemplate=822

From what I would like to understand in the article, it would be possible to install one single license of NX on a dedicated server, and have different users logging in to this server and running different instances of NX on that single license.
The cost of the license would then be optimized since it could be used by a few more users than just one.

Is this technically and legally possible?

Any other suggestions on technically and legally feasible ways to spend less money on licensing would be welcome.

Thank you

 

[JohnRBaker]

If you're talking about a license for a single SEAT of NX then no matter where the software or the licence is being served from, the cloud or the desktop PC in the next room, only ONE user at a time will be allowed to log into NX and run a session. The cloud does NOT change our licensing procedures nor policies, it's merely the next iteration of how people are going to be accessing the software that they've purchased and the data that they're creating. Actually, this is not all that NEW of an idea. For us old-timers, we can remember the days when people used RJE (Remote Job Entry) set-ups to connect, often over dial-up lines, to some 'mainframe' located at some remote facility, usually run by some service provider like McAuto, UCC (Univeristy Computing Company), etc.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[DavidDEC]

Thanks John,

too bad to hear that. I really thought/hoped that it was a step towards a more flexible way of accessing NX.

As much as I love NX interface and functionalities, I find the whole distribution and pricing policy completely rigid and hard to tackle when starting a small business. There is no way now of paying only for the time you use NX, and paying only for those parts of it that you use. It's too bad that the big, expensive chunks in which you can buy/rent it now make your whole business strategy gravitate towards it.

The whole purchasing process is also quite obscure, since no webpage or document really states exactly what you get with each bundle (in datasheet format for example) and it takes a lot of phone calls with your distributor to get an idea.

So I hope that in the future Siemens PLM will start paying attention to smaller businesses and freelance professionals in the market and will find it also profitable to deliver NX in a much more scalable, transparent and flexible way (Autodesk way maybe??).

Any news of Siemens PLM working on that direction would be very much welcome.

 

[looslib]

You can have multiple users 'share' the one license, if you run it 24 hours a day and are in different time zones, so each user is actually sharing the 1 license. You could set up a company that owns the license and 'rent' it to the other users while you are not using it.

Having NX on the cloud is very flexible, but you have to realize that you only bought 1 license and therefore only 1 user may use that license at any point in time. Cloud software serving is not much different than douing a network install. Software sits in one location and multiple people can access it, up to your license limit. Updates are easy, one update and everyone has the latest.

I would not expect Siemens to change thier pricing policy. They may do some bundling to include modules that are less used with the more popular modules and reduce the price of the bumdle over ala carte purchases.

The configuration and listing of what is in a bundle should be open documents, but from my experience it is buried in the salesman's configuration guide. I'm not even sure PTC lists all the modules in their bundles, either. I know what they are from looking at a license file.


"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."

Ben Loosli

 

[JohnRBaker]

There is no way now of paying only for the time you use NX, and paying only for those parts of it that you use.

Stay tuned...

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.