ANSYS to Offer Public Cloud Hosting Option for Enterprises

ANSYS explains the setup of its new offering, ANSYS Enterprise Cloud, in this chart (image courtesy of ANSYS).

In a clear nod to the public cloud's growing popularity, long-time simulation software maker ANSYS began offering what it calls ANSYS Enterprise Cloud beginning this month.

In its May 5 announcement, ANSYS wrote, "The new solution, running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), simplifies and accelerates the transition to cloud-based simulation by providing a reference architecture for end-to-end simulation that can be deployed within days -- minimizing risk while boosting productivity. Customers who adopt the ANSYS Enterprise Cloud can scale their simulation capacity -- including infrastructure and software assets -- on demand."

To be clear, ANSYS Enterprise Cloud on AWS is not SaaS (Software as a Service). It's not the option to use ANSYS from a browser in a pay-as-you-go model. Rather, it's the option to run ANSYS in a "virtual private cloud," set up on public cloud provider AWS's infrastructure. It sounds paradoxical, but it probably makes perfect sense to the IT folks.

With ANSYS Enterprise Cloud, you have a private space on AWS dedicated to your enterprise's simulation needs. Therefore, the setup is "private" to ANSYS and the enterprise user, even though it's hosted on AWS. It's an attractive option for businesses with irregular simulation workload, too erratic to justify acquiring and maintaining on-premise hardware.

Barbara Hutchings, ANSYS's director of strategic partnership, said the new product offers "business agility" to customers with "projects that come and go."

It's also a good option for businesses with existing AWS accounts. Going with ANSYS Enterprise Cloud meant the user can rely on ANSYS to do the legwork to ensure the simulation jobs run smoothly on AWS.

Hutchings said, "Taking simulation to the cloud is not trivial. We have a highly engineered solution that we can deploy for our customer within a matter of days. So [users] now have a way to go to the cloud at low risk, rapidly. The solution has already been tested and is supported by us."

Ray Milhem, ANSYS's VP of enterprise solutions, said,"The idea is to keep the desktop or PC [client] as thin as possible. [Users] can access their work from home, from a conference room, from any remote location."

Hutchings said, "Customers can use their existing licenses to run ANSYS on Enterprise Cloud. And we're not changing how they buy these licenses." However, the company is also introducing what it calls "elastic licensing." It's ANSYS's initiative to "evolve its business model to mimic the cloud's elasticity," she added.

ANSYS also has a partnership with Rescale, which offers on-demand computing infrastructure to simulation software users. Hutchings said, "The Enterprise Cloud is a perfect fit for customers who have an IT initiative to use the public cloud. Solutions from partners like Rescale are a good fit for customers who don't have an IT initiative, want to have access to HPC (high performance computing), and want to be largely hands off."

This week, Rescale also launched its own offerings dubbed ScaleX Enterprise, described as "a consolidated platform for simulation software and HPC hardware.