In any enterprise-wide PLM deployment the subject of integration to legacy systems is going to be important.
Everybody knows that Aras has a comprehensive suite of pre-packaged connector integrations for MCAD, EDA / ECAD and ERP systems, however, not everyone knows about our custom integration capabilities.
Whether the topic is interfacing with the ERP suite, extending an old PDM system or plugging into an EAI / ESB environment, it's necessary to securely share data between systems across your company's global IT landscape.
We get asked about Aras's integration capabilities regularly, and it's one of the areas where our PLM platform has a significant advantage over the major legacy PLM systems that most people are familiar with.
As an open architecture, Aras has a number of obvious advantages... open APIs, a published data dictionary, an openly available data model... but that's really only half the story.
From a technological perspective we're using a more modern approach, a pure Web services approach, that's designed from the ground up with technology agnostic interoperability in mind. Aras can be "connected to", "integrated with" and "wrapped around" anything you've got whether its based on IBM, Oracle, SAP, Linux, Unix, Microsoft or even Progress... or "all of the above". We even include a Web services wizard in our Solution Studio out-of-the-box.
We understand that global companies need to combine data from numerous existing systems in order to manage products across the lifecycle, and we recognize that a highly robust, scalable and secure Federated approach is the right way to do this; both from a technical and a business perspective.
So, here's a series of overview materials that can help you better understand our advanced capabilities for Integration & Federation:
Aras Integration & Federation Overview
How to Think About Integrations with Aras
Understanding Federation and Web Services in Aras
And unlike most enterprise PLM providers that just show you slides, you can actually validate everything we're talking about.
For those hands-on people, there are a lot of detail-level materials available such as the Aras Programmers Guide and documents like How-To Use Federated Data in Aras and How-To Consume a Web Service in a Method using Aras and much more.