Anti-Myopic PLM

It has been an exciting 2 weeks here at Aras.  We are currently in the middle of week long company meetings where nearly everyone is in the Andover office.  Having the opportunity to work with our peers from Europe and Japan is energizing!  We have also had some exciting announcements.  We are very proud of our recent partnerships with Starlite, Brenton, Akrapovič, and JAMCO.  They each present opportunities to learn and to help a customer to be more effective.

And there was the Airbus partnership announcement!  Just 30,000 seats to an aerospace giant.

Among all of this excitement I'm also an MBA student at The Purdue Krannert School of Management.  An assignment had me reading a famous paper written by Dr. Theodore Levitt for The Harvard Business Review titled "Marketing Myopia."  In it, the example of the railroad business struck a chord with me.  They lost sight of the fact that they were in the transportation business - not just the rail business, and you know the rest.

I think that the same can be said about the status quo in the PLM industry.  Our friends at the big 3 PLM vendors have been carving up the market for the past 30 years, developing and buying technology and selling solutions to PLM problems.  To answer Dr. Levitt's question of "What business are you really in?"  At Aras we believe that we are here to solve problems related to the Business of Engineering.

Looking at our recent announcements there is a trend - leveraging the Aras platform to manage business processes and connect other key systems - PDM, ERP, MES, etc.  Airbus noted our open architecture & on-the-fly data modeling, ease of integration & handling and Long term viability & TCO as key points in their decision process.   These are important capabilities!  They are needed to provide the flexibility and scale-ability to help all of our customers - large and small, to manage their key business processes.  Not just CAD and PDM, but business processes like design, testing, manufacturing, and sourcing, and servicing.  And not by shotgunning solutions on a matrix, but by providing a PLM Platform that was specifically designed for integration and growth.

Our announcements say that, indeed, we ARE doing something right.    We ARE enabling our customers to manage their Business of Engineering efficiently and cost effectively.  Our customers see that the myopic status quo can be avoided in favor of a strong long term future.

And we're just warming up!

 

-Dave