Innovation cycles are getting shorter and shorter, and the competition doesn't sleep – these factors characterize developments in fast-paced industries like automotives and medical technology. For this reason, IBM's business partner PLATO AG offers its customers industry-specific software solutions for engineering and quality management to optimize the product development process. These solutions can also now be obtained through the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise (SCE) in Ehningen, which guarantees fast and reliable availability of the solutions.
"Our customers in the automotive and medical technology industries are faced with the challenge of realizing shorter and shorter product design times while continuously increasing the number of innovations in order to stay competitive in the market", says Andreas Großmann, CEO of the PLATO AG. "We help our customers with complex quality process solutions that significantly shorten the cycle of innovation, and thus reduce the costs associated with innovations."
The IBM business partner PLATO AG is an international software company and service provider located in Lübeck, Germany, offering solutions for maintaining a consistent data concept during the entire digital product design and development process; from the customer requirements, risk analysis, and derivation of actions phases to quality management.
To address the core IT issues of cost and efficiency even more effectively, companies will soon be able to use the PLATO software solutions through the cloud. Thanks to the "Infrastructure as a Service" (IaaS) concept, PLATO customers have access in the IBM cloud to four virtual server environments that provide customer-specific software solutions flexibly and according to their needs. This offers the advantage that customers can concentrate entirely on using the solution without having to build up their own IT expertise.
The cloud can also help to reduce the amount of in-house IT necessary because customers are only charged for the services they actually use. However, data security still needs to be guaranteed – and this applies especially to the handling of sensitive customer data. The IBM SCE at the site in Ehningen fulfills all requirements arising in the context of security and compliance according to German security standards.
"To continue to be innovative, small and medium enterprises want and need access to the latest IT solutions, and this access needs to be economical, flexible, and scalable", says Martina Fiddrich, Director of Midmarket Sales and Partnership Solution Center, IBM Germany. "With the PLATO AG, customers from the manufacturing industry have a partner on their side that makes this possible using cloud-based services."