You might have seen the PLM press today about a pretty significant win for Aras. Carestream Health, which is an international provider of medical and dental imaging systems and other complex healthcare equipment (a multi-billion dollar private equity spinout and formerly Kodak Healthcare Imaging), is replacing their outdated and highly customized global implementation of Dassault's ENOVIA MatrixOne and a whole collection of other legacy systems with Aras.

The CIO at Carestream Health, Bruce Leidal, says, "We're a progressive company and we want to work with other forward-thinking companies who can help us eliminate organizational silos and increase collaborative development to achieve a competitive advantage in the marketplace." He goes on to say, "In switching to Aras we now have a highly capable, global PLM platform that will allow us to consolidate other systems at will, increasing reuse and improving collaboration without continual capital investment in PLM licenses."

David Sherburne, Leader of Global R&D Effectiveness added, "We wanted a single enterprise PLM backbone for engineering, quality and regulatory compliance, tightly integrated with SAP. When compared to other PLM suppliers, Aras offered a solution unique to the industry. Our legacy platform (i.e. ENOVIA MatrixOne) was built a long time ago and we knew we didn’t have the functionality required for the future."

The deployment will be rolled out in phases to support the full product commercialization processes including global product development and supplier collaboration. More than 3,000 users worldwide will use Aras, as well as, suppliers around the world.

This is yet another example of a company that understands the benefits of a more modern and advanced solution combined with the cost advantages achieved at scale with the elimination of PLM license expenses.

The guys at Develop 3D added their own perspective (and a funny title) in Carestream Health dumps highly customised MatrixOne in favour of Aras’ Open Source PLM

What's your take? Is it time to rethink the 'blindly buy whatever the big guys sell' mentality or are only "progressive companies" like Carestream Health going to break free?