Happy new year to everyone! We’re looking forward to a great 2012, and looking back at 2011 it was another record breaker.
In addition to achieving record sales and double digit growth again (that’s 5 years in a row for anyone counting), we increased our customer base by over 43% to 296 worldwide.
Our success this year continues to reinforce our position as the industry’s next generation PLM platform, and it underscores the power of our out-of-the-box solution suite to address the most complex PLM processes in global enterprise implementations.
We’re proud of these strategic partnerships and are committed to the long term relationships we have as the PLM platform provider of choice at your company.
As we continue to grow around the world, we’re particularly glad to see a continuously expanding level of collaboration across the corporate community.
In fact, our major open release in 2011 of Aras Innovator, Version 9.3, included a combination of innovations from a wide range of companies like Carestream Health, Freudenberg, DIEHL Metering HYDROMETER and numerous other customers.
The release was optimized for those large-scale global PLM deployments where secure collaboration and federated integration are critical.
Highlights included:
- Standard CAD integration platform for global companies that operate a large scale multi-CAD environment
- High performance multi-file check-out which is a parallel asynchronous streaming technology moves sets of files across the WAN significantly faster than previously possible with other PLM systems
- Dynamic team collaboration security for on-the-fly secure collaboration on any item or group of items in the system such as BOMs with related MCAD, EDA and software files
- Out-of-the-box capabilities to run multiple different change management workflows concurrently
- Simplified scenario for enterprise changes that involve the release of a large group of affected items
- New visual impact matrix for change management
- Workflow process enablement of cross-generation on items which simplifies collaboration on versionable business items
- New single sign-on capabilities for workflow authentication
- Introduction of express Document Change Order (DCO) workflow
- Enhanced configuration management capabilities for configuration baseline history
- Improved multi-level Bill of Materials (BOM) view
- Expanded International time zone functionality
- Improved system tracking for special security scenarios
- New vault replication enhancements
- Thumbnails saved as vaulted items
- Support for Internet Explorer 9
And you can download the latest Aras Innovator open release to get all this and more to take your company's PLM strategy to the next level.
2011 also saw further enhancements to our CAD connector suite that includes CATIA, NX, Creo & Pro/ENGINEER, SolidWorks, Solid Edge, Inventor, AutoCAD and more, as well as, EDA systems such as Allegro, OrCAD, DxDesigner / DxDatabook, PADS, Expedition, Altium, Zuken CR-5000 and others.
There were numerous solutions released by our partners this year for everything from new business process templates and developer tools to enterprise search solutions from NorthRidge Software and Alcove9, as well as, Formula & Recipe Management Solution by PSC Group, File Converter Framework from T-Systems, and Alternative Structure Browser for Large Assemblies by Minerva and many more.
And in the fall, we released an exciting new product for companies that run SolidWorks called Aras EPLM for SolidWorks EPDM. It provides packaged functionality out-of-the-box for New Product Development and Introduction (NPDI), Complex Configuration Management, Enterprise Change Management, Outsourced Manufacturing, Quality Compliance and other cross-functional processes.
If you’re company runs SolidWorks and you didn’t hear about Aras EPLM, you can check out the site for more info and watch the demo recording to see it in action.
We also added new enhancements to the Aras Community Project Site (that’s powered by Aras Innovator) which expand the use of open innovation. We’re creating an environment where you can post ideas, share best practices and take action to transform your own business.
We want to encourage secure, self-sufficient collaborative development on PLM solutions because we understand that the next generation of innovation in PLM will come from the millions of people around the world like you that use PLM software every day.
In addition to updating our online presence, we relocated our global headquarters to new, larger offices to accommodate all this growth. We’re in a world class office campus now with more than double the space, an expanded training facility and our new Aras Innovation Center for PLM collaboration.
And if you’re a PLM rock star, we’re actively recruiting in the areas of PLM software architects, developers and consultants, as well as in finance, IT operations and international marketing. We’re anticipating expanding our headcount by 100% or more in the coming year.
Our 2011 Aras Community Events (ACE) series was also bigger than ever with conferences in China, Germany, Korea, Japan, Sweden, Denmark, Finland as well as others and online webcasts too. It’s clear that people want to connect face-to-face as well as online to collaborate effectively.
Let us know if you’d like to host an ACE session in 2012, we’re expecting even more sessions this year and we’d be glad to have your company host an ACE session.
There’s so much going on that this post only scratches the surface... what we’d really like to do is thank you for your participation and innovation with Aras in 2011, and we look forward to another record year in 2012.