BCT Technology AG – Automated cloud resources for Siemens PLM Teamcenter

BCT Technology AG – Automated cloud resources for Siemens PLM Teamcenter.

The product lifecycle management (PLM) solution, Siemens PLM Teamcenter, integrates a company’s data, processes, corporate systems and employees into an information management system. BCT Technology AG leads the way in integrating businesses with the PLM Teamcenter platform, and, together with Bechtle, the specialist for CAD and PLM software solutions and services now also offers the implementation of public cloud infrastructures. Bechtle develops the perfect complementary Managed Services concepts and infrastructure solutions in AWS for the individual needs of BCT’s customers.

Project details.

Services

Managed Services
Cloud

Industry

ITC / Media

Manufacturer

Company size

< 250 employees

Challenge.

BCT Technology AG is Germany’s largest Siemens PLM partner for software solutions and services in the fields of CAD and PLM (product lifecycle management). As a Platinum Siemens Partner, BCT integrates Siemens PLM Teamcenter as a product lifecycle management solutions for its customers and develops its own expansion modules. Teamcenter is a modern, PLM system that connects people and processes, across functional silos, with a digital thread for innovation. BCT had previously predominantly installed the platform as an on-premise version, but companies were increasingly shifting their investments away fry from CapEx (capital expenditure) to OpEx (operating expenditure). The result was, instead of investing in new end devices at regular intervals, outgoings were used for business development. Cloud-based services and Infrastructure as a Service are, therefore, increasingly high up on the agenda. BCT can offer Siemens PLM Teamcenter through AWS as the platform is certified for Amazon’s public cloud infrastructure, but they didn’t have sufficient expertise in the individually tailored AWS infrastructure solutions and Managed Services concepts. And this is where Bechtle came in. Within the scope of a framework project, Bechtle and BCT put together a new Teamcenter environment in the AWS Cloud, laying the foundations for the automatic provisioning of an IT infrastructure in the cloud for BCT’s customers.

We at BCT offer our customers a PLM platform tailored to their requirements and thanks to Bechtle, they can now run their Siemens PLM Teamcenter in the cloud, too. The IT company also provides the appropriate resources in the AWS Cloud as well as Managed Services. The test with our infrastructure ran incredibly smoothly, but we also learned that security is top of the agenda. We will continue our partnership with Bechtle so that our customers can leverage even greater benefits in terms of security in the flexible and transparent cloud solution.

Sascha Ellmer, Head of order Processing, BCT Technology AG

Solution.

Together with BCT, Bechtle’s cloud experts initially developed a rough concept of how to transfer the on-premise Teamcenter systems into the AWS Cloud, paying particular heed to the AWS architecture’s well-architected framework and Teamcenter certification. The guidelines provided by Siemens formed the basis of a fully supported Teamcenter on AWS. The concept also covered a disaster recovery scenario and training admin staff. Bechtle facilitated the implementation by leveraging its own CloudFormation and Terraform templates. Templates created using Netways Terraform utilise a simply syntax and automatically provision the infrastructure required for a Teamcenter implementation. Bechtle also leveraged AWS backup technology and created various Teamcenter backup models, thus successfully realising the concept to back up several server resources and databases simultaneously. The result is a robust, secure and scalable infrastructure that can be recovered within seconds if the server goes down and can be adapted to each of BCT’s customers, saving BCT and its customers admin and AWS costs. Moreover, thanks to the high level of automation, BCT and Bechtle were able to deploy the new environment very quickly. Bechtle followed an Infrastructure as a Cloud approach, which means that the infrastructure can be used in another region at any time. All the experts have to do is adapt the Terraform templates to the individual customer’s needs, allowing BCT’s PLM specialists to concentrate on their core business. Bechtle ensures that SLAs and costs remain transparent for the architecture and beyond. Bechtle also trains a BCT employee as a solutions architect to ensure consistent knowledge transfer. This also allows BCT to handle operations by themselves. For BCT Technology AG’s customers, Bechtle not only implements AWS, but within the framework of its Managed Services, also handles patching, security, backup, customer queries and everything else AWS.

Business benefits.

Thanks to the infrastructure configured in AWS by Bechtle, BCT Technology AG now has a highly-available and high-performance Teamcenter cloud environment that will meet the demands of tomorrow. Integration and management in the cloud and beyond are child’s play thanks to the templates Bechtle created. Everything is fully automated, which saves BCT a considerable amount of money as Bechtle can quickly provision AWS to BCT customer’s as required.