Has Digital Transformation Reached Your Engineering Teams Yet?

Is your organization focused on digital transformation, but still overlooking R&D and engineering transformation?

Digital transformation boils down to the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, designed to deliver value. Desirable outcomes include reduced operational costs, greater efficiency and productivity, and an enhanced experience for customers and employees. In short, digital transformation is about competitive advantage, and the key enabler is cloud.

While areas such as ERP, CRM, finance and HR have seen huge digital transformation success, many R&D and engineering divisions often lag behind the curve. This is likely because computer-aided engineering (CAE) relies on high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure, which historically depended on significant on-premises investment. 

This kind of HPC has traditionally been hardware-centric, with highly specialized IT teams managing complex systems, tuning performance, managing workflows, and more. In addition, on-premises systems offer the comfort of ownership and control.

But technology should be the enabler, not the driving force; don’t let the tail wag the dog! The aim is to provide the best technology that enables engineers to run more CAE simulations more quickly, and to accelerate innovation. If a new technology model such as cloud makes life easier, more productive, and more enjoyable, then there should be no debate.

Advantages of Cloud HPC Over On-premise HPC

Cloud now offers significant advantages over on-premises HPC, with a compelling promise of utility computing and storage, combined with elasticity, performance, scalability, and availability. And former worries about security – presuming those worries were justified – have been fully resolved.

From a financial perspective, organizations will likely favor the OPEX cost model of cloud services over the CAPEX model of on-premises infrastructure for technology acquisition. While on-premises may appear more cost effective on a single workload basis when hardware is run at 100% utilization, the reality is that HPC practitioners have peaky compute resource needs and diverse application portfolios – and thus hardware and specialized architecture needs will vary greatly. The flexibility of on-demand scale, architecture types, and increasingly economical cost models in the cloud is winning over even the most staunch cloud hold-outs.

However, simply moving existing systems to the cloud and labelling it ‘Digital Transformation’ does not guarantee success; again, technology is purely the enabler. Organizational culture change is at the heart of digital transformation, which means gaining buy-in across the company, from the buying committee to every end user. 

In the resource-intensive operations of on-premises HPC there is often a reluctance or even fear of change. For example, technicians who have built careers on creating and curating data centers can feel threatened by the idea of cloud computing. Yet in practice, cloud-based HPC allows IT staff to focus on the high-value work like enabling new use cases and optimizing workflows for performance and cost reduction.

Building a Future-Proof HPC Strategy

Rescale is HPC Built for the Cloud which means customers have access to the latest hybrid-cloud technologies in a simple and cloud-based software-as-a-service interface, now commonly referred to as a HPC as-a-service (HPCaaS) solution. Being cloud-based and compatible with hybrid-cloud infrastructure provides advanced control, automation, and collaboration tools over any existing or new infrastructure options – Yes, that means the best of both on-prem and multi-cloud options. Users and IT teams no longer need to spend time on infrastructure configuration, and instead can focus on issues that really matter like driving product innovation and R&D breakthroughs.

Rescale has enabled customers – many of them leading innovators in their industries – to modernize their engineering operations in line with the rest of their digital transformation goals. If your digital transformation goals include enhancing R&D and engineering capabilities to deliver new products faster with more efficient resource utilization, then check out the impact Rescale is driving across industries.

Rescale’s HPC and Customer Success teams are made up of HPC and cloud experts who can help you bring your digital transformation vision to R&D and engineering, and show IT teams how they can become essential partners on the journey. Cloud-based HPC from Rescale delivers value to R&D and engineering teams by removing infrastructure management from the IT team’s workload, enabling self-service for the users, and freeing up time for both sides to focus on what really matters: enhanced business value. 

There is no doubt that cloud-based HPC delivers competitive advantage, and yet in many cases R&D and engineering teams have yet to make – or even start – the digital transformation journey. Rescale can help! Reach out here or sign up for a demo