If you keep your eye on our press releases or Twitter feed, you may have noticed a recent string of posts about new subscribers in Italy. Aras Gold Certified Partner, FocusPLM has been hitting it out of the park lately and they have much to show for their hard work.
A couple weeks ago I was in Italy for a meeting with a potential new subscriber in the aerospace market. The meeting went really well and the company is very excited about Aras and our PLM technology.
I wasn’t surprised that they are excited – I’ve been hands-on with Aras PLM for more than 10 years and I still get excited about it. What caught my attention was what they are excited about.
They definitely appreciate our no license fee model that will enable them to get up and running at a fraction of the cost of legacy PLM systems. And they are pleased that our enterprise open source approach gives them control over their own destiny and they know they will never be locked in to our technology or locked out of their own data. But the thing that really got them going was… Aras customization and ease of upgrade.
These are not PLM novices. They’ve been around the block with legacy PLM systems. They’ve worked hard and invested lots (and lots) of money to customize those systems so they worked just the way they needed them to. Only find out that they were stuck at their current rev of the product because it was either too costly, or simply not possible, to upgrade with all that customization.
It’s not the first time I’ve heard this. And it won’t be the last. And it’s not just Italians – although it did make for a catchy title. I’ve seen it in the U.S. I saw it big time last month at ACE Japan. In fact, I see it everywhere.
Too many companies have been burned by PLM vendors who charge you outrageous fees to customize their systems the first time and expect you to pay them again and again and again… every time their system is ready to be upgraded.
Aras is different. Our model-based service oriented architecture (SOA) separates the business logic from the underlying web services source code, so upgrades to the software can be done without affecting existing customizations. Aras upgrades are so easy we include them our subscription package so Aras subscribers know they can always take full advantage of our most current technology and innovations. The Director of Engineering IT at the company in Italy claimed the modeling architecture from Aras is the first game changing technology he’s seen in PLM, and like me, he’s been around for a long time.