As Deloitte Canada’s director of research for technology, Duncan Stewart has a particularly revealing vantage point when he comments in a recent Pivot Magazine article that the pandemic has accelerated cloud adoption.
Stewart goes on to suggest that “once a company has figured out how to go faster in their cloud journey, once they have overcome any challenges and set up the policies and procedures required to move quickly, they realized that the cloud is a viable permanent solution.”
Indeed, cloud computing is ubiquitous in today’s technology landscape. While that wasn’t always the case, the benefits and drawbacks are well established and understood. At this point, the question isn’t so much if, but how to leverage the cloud?
Market Forces Driving Simulation
Fierce global competition is driving the need for shorter design cycles, accelerated time-to-market, cost reduction, and the development of smarter products to meet customer demand. Product developers must also navigate the requirements of various regulatory frameworks. Companies are turning to engineering simulation as a solution to meet these challenges, much as they did with the cloud to meet their IT needs.
While simulation is widely recognized as a beneficial technology in most respects, which suggests that companies across multiple sectors should be doing more of it, the reality of how companies are using simulation is more complex.
In a global study sponsored by Dassault Systèmes, Engineering.com surveyed 268 engineers to find out: How are they doing simulations and how often? The resulting report reveals some surprises, including the following key findings:
- 80% of engineers are still using physical prototypes, which suggests many remain unable to leverage the full benefits of virtualization.
- Validation of one simulation with another is the second most popular means of validation after physical testing and prototypes.
- Engineers who are outsourcing simulations are typically experiencing relatively long wait times, which suggests an opportunity for building up capabilities internally. For companies providing 3rd party simulation solutions, it is an opportunity to differentiate by exceeding expectations.
- Most simulation computing is done locally, on workstations. While simulation on the cloud is much faster, most of the engineers surveyed felt that a full-cloud approach to the simulation is still some way off.
- The cloud is still far away for many, and while half of the respondents leveraged it to some degree, over a third do not currently implement cloud at all, nor do they have any plans to do so.
At the very least, it seems that the benefits of simulation, especially in the cloud, need to be more clearly articulated, not only to engineers but to all the various stakeholders involved in the design and development process.
You may access the full survey report here.
