Building a Tool Platform for your cloud applications

Customer council 3 years back...

After explaining the features of our newest design collaboration platform, I picked up a discussion with an European customer having manufacturing and design operations China.

Customer: Can you add a 3D modeling tool with CAD editing capabilities to your collaboration platform?

Me: Do you expect this to save on the license cost for your CAD (Was it PTC Creo, Catia, I don't remember exactly) tools? We can never build it as great as these guys.

Customer: No not really. We don't mind purchasing licenses for our users. We had two problems - Maintaining single source of truth for our CAD files and ensure that everyone is working on the same file version; Software tool chain that we use. You have solved my first problem with your collaboration platform. Now I worry about the tools. How to get them installed, maintained and upgraded on the users machines. How do I ensure that they use the right configurations e.g. the renderers like VRay, Twilight etc. And then when they use the tools to edit the CAD files, I am back with the original problem of files and their copies. How do I ensure they are keeping my IP safe. You know my problem ;)

Me: How do you mitigate this today. Citrix? It is an excellent way of virtualizing your tools.

Customer: But I still have the problem with files and IP.

Me: Ok, understood, let me get back to the drawing board.

"Dear customer, I no longer work on the collaboration platform. However, I have a solution approach if, your IT team wish to implement. I explain it here - Tool marketplace for an Enterprise Collaboration Platform"

What does this bring on the table...

1. Tight integration of content store with the tools that operate on the content. There by ensuring single source of truth, access control and IP protection.
2. Simplify the Software delivery IT team has to manage per department, per role.
3. Democratizing the end user device market with thin devices that can be made cheaper for farther reach and specialize end user computing moves to cloud. Look at how Google Colab and Jupyter are revolutionizing it.
4. Sustainable computing with Green IT

Note: DM me if you want to know how to build this. I have made all my GitHub repositories private now. Not because I don't want to share references. Once an over enthusiast person just took the code as is and ran it for a month. I was in the end billed Rs 5,000 ;)