How SaaS and MaaS Impact Industry

A little more than a year ago in another Take Five video, I highlighted how the as-a-service model was beginning to change how automation technologies are being offered. So now, I want to update this story by highlighting two start-up companies that have been able to develop very quickly due to the availability of software as a service. I learned about these companies at Siemens recent media and analyst day in Detroit. One of these companies is Saildrone, a company that designs, manufactures, and operates a fleet of uncrewed surface vehicles for maritime security, ocean mapping, and ocean data collection. Saildrone’s customers don’t purchase the drones they build, instead they pay for the data collected by them. Saildrone is using Siemens Xcelerator cloud-based portfolio as a service to improve design collaboration across the organization without the need for traditional IT infrastructure to support it. Andrew Schultz, chief technology officer at Saildrone, says: Manufacturing uses the software for purchasing and building the components in the drones, and the finance teams use it to track inventory. He says software as a service is key to them because Saildrone’s primary focus is on engineering new products and making their drones and services better—not having to manage and update an on-premises server.