Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1189040
DECEMBER 2019 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 35 are other people around the edge, such as the customer, marketing, service and support for the product, test and pro- totype, assembly, and fabrication. All of these people need to see the data in the way that they need to see it, but you want to take it from one central source of truth that's unadulterated and doesn't change on its way through passing from hand to hand. Instead, with a platform like Altium 365, we can have one sys- tem where the data is trustworthy and in one place. Johnson: The vision you're painting screams like an air raid siren for a collabora- tive online platform. Jordan: Collaboration goes way beyond multi- ple people designing one board to get it done in less time, and we demoed that this morn- ing. I did the schematic, Antonio Becerra Est- aban [Altium field applications engineer from Spain] did the PCB layout, and Narek Darbin- yan [field applications engineer from France] did the MCAD, mechanical enclosure, and board shape for us; we were able to bounce it around those domains with different people, so there's that side of collaboration. Having one system enables that kind of smooth col- laboration without breaking the data models. Johnson: Lawrence has been making one key statement throughout this conference: "We're going to do this using the cloud. If you have worries about that, okay, but if it's not the cloud, then what?" I'm interested in getting your thoughts on having the cloud behind something like this. It makes sense that this would be the right kind of tool, and yet a lot of people have ongoing trepidations. How do you answer that? Jordan: That's important. In our industry, there's still a large concern. The concern is not about whether the cloud is reliable or con- nected or not because we know it is. We've used it for other things for a long time, such as online banking, web and mobile apps and browsers, etc. In most countries, we have good internet connectivity, so that's not the prob- lem. It comes down to who do we trust with our intellectual property? Designs are an impor- tant piece of intellectual property. But then we see people doing things like emailing Ger- ber and drill files and IPC-D-356 netlists, and that's almost enough information to reverse- engineer the product. It's not secure to email these things. Others know this and have systems for secure file sharing, but they still do it. I know of gov- ernment contractors who use a secure file- sharing service and computing in the cloud; they have a layer of encryption over it, and we can do the same thing. Fairly recently, Ama- zon released a version of EC2 called "Govern- ment Cloud," which allows people to have that additional layer of security and backup. I don't know all of the details about it, but I know it addresses these issues. Thus, it's only a mat- ter of time before people have to be honest and realize the cloud is not the issue here; it enables us to share this information in a secure way. As Lawrence said, you're already banking on it. Sometimes, we value IP over money, and I can see how we would do that, but the truth is if it's good enough for your bank, it's prob- ably good enough for your business. Johnson: You're making the point that this is much more established than some may real- ize. This sort of technical infrastructure has become a reality for us.