Recently, Aras and AVEVA announced a strategic licensing partnership. The two companies will collaborate on developing scalable Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions that enable the Industrial Digital Twin. AVEVA is a world leader in the industrial software space, driving digital transformation and sustainability through the optimization of asset reliability and performance and the use of hybrid cloud solutions. Integrating Aras’ cloud-native technology with the AVEVA solutions will give customers new avenues from which to address change and configuration management, requirements management and whole asset visualization.
Our blog editor had the opportunity to sit down with two members of the AVEVA team, Rick Standish, VP of the Engineering Information Management Business Unit, and Gary Patterson, VP of Global Solution Sales, Engineering Information Management Portfolio, to discuss this new relationship and why it matters to both AVEVA and Aras.
Can you tell our audience more about what motivated AVEVA to enter into this partnership with Aras?
Rick Standish: We've been searching for this partnership for a considerable number of years. What motivated us is the portfolio that AVEVA has in the engineering space. We focus heavily on data aggregation, how we put that information in context and how we share the information as a platform. We've wanted a much closer alliance partner at a strategic level to look at how we make a holistic digital twin on a single source of truth for the engineering and system of record.
It's great to provide a one-stop offering for a digital twin in the engineering space. And so, we chose Aras for its capability not only to be a flexible but an agnostic PLM platform.
Gary Patterson: And to add to that, when we look at Aras’ recent performance, this growth of 30-plus percent is phenomenal. You're beginning to take market share away from the incumbent PLM providers, which is again a key positive, as well as the agility of your development team. Your performance is something that attracted us as well, and that market share that you're gaining year-on-year.
RS: The synergy of the two portfolios is as well. So, it's a highly complementary offering in the areas we want to provide in the Industrial Information Platform. The areas of the portfolio that we want to focus on are our core competencies, and there's not much overlap between the two portfolios in terms of how we would compete in the market. It is as close to a perfect alliance as we hoped for in a strategic partnership.
Can you talk briefly about how Aras and AVEVA dovetail with each other in this synergistic complementary relationship?
GP: You know, we have an extensive portfolio that supports capital project execution and day-to-day operations. But where we fall short is in that of asset traceability, and that is a broad spectrum and topic in its own right. The complement with Aras is that we can give our customers the ability to fully audit their change process as they go from self-creation to day-to-day operations. The goal with digital twins, and our owner-operator customer community, is to have a digital representation of the physical asset. And one of the largest challenges in doing that is ensuring that that data is evergreen and they've got full historic auditability of when changes were made and by whom. And as I said, AVEVA just doesn’t have that in our armory, but with Aras, we will.
RS: We're all really excited about that. And I think from a visionary perspective, when we get to the industrial information platform, picking up what Gary was saying about the transition to SaaS, ultimately, AVEVA wants to provide this industrial information platform and a set of services that represent not only the digital twin for an individual asset or a project but right across the digital fleet.
And to do that and elevate this information to an industrial or a corporate-wide level, we want to be sure that the platforms that we are building on are not only the leading technologies for data aggregation but also ensure the veracity and the audit history of the data in that digital fleet. We want to start building that asset traceability capability.
How does Aras’ ability to automate business processes and provide a complete-asset digital twin benefit the process industries?
RS: In the process industry and the customers that we work with, the majority have a digitalized strategy. Some are at different levels of digital maturity. Their ambition is to get to that digital twin of their physical asset and be able to learn from that digital twin and run analysis and fleet-wide search and reporting. But they can and must make day-to-day business-critical decisions with the information available. And the biggest challenge that they face is having that confidence or trust in the information they're making those decisions against.
And the word trust is key to our customers when they're talking digital twin or digitization.
And how does this aspect of asset lifecycle management help AVEVA customers progress their digital transformation goals?
RS: We've seen most of our customers pivoting to a cloud strategy themselves and looking for vendors that can deliver that cloud and SaaS-based offering. On-prem, highly configured environments are moving more to a cost-based solution offering in the cloud. Also, picking up on that from a partnership perspective is the converse of saying that it's about templatization and how quickly we can deploy at scale to all enterprise customers.
But one of the attractions of the Aras platform is in creating these products and soft-configuring things like data models and customization flexibility that we want to deliver. Aras is one of the few providers that can accommodate those needs and assure that users get upgraded between versions and can scale quickly. We know we've tried and can achieve the same flexibility to deliver those OEM products to the market.
GP: Also, we are all becoming SaaS-first companies. And where we'll work together to build a portfolio of offerings for our customers that will embrace both our cloud strategies.
Join Aras at AVEVA World!
Aras will participate at AVEVA World 2022, taking place November 14-17, 2022, in San Francisco, CA. In addition to being a silver sponsor of the event and hosting two lightning track sessions, CEO Roque Martin will take part in a main stage panel centered around designing and operating sustainable industrial ecosystems of the future.
Aras will also be hosting a lightning track on day one and day three. The session titled, Effectively Control Your Data for Traceability and Compliance Across the Lifecycle, will provide an overview of its partnership with AVEVA and highlight a few customer examples.
Visit booth #12 in the expo center and at the AVEVA Digital Twin booth #26 to view a solution demonstration, speak with an expert, and hear about the value of PLM in concert with AVEVA’s solutions.
Learn more about Aras’ presence at AVEVA World.