Arena Touts 100th Customer for PLM Solution

The former bom.com points to advantages of Web-based product lifecycle management solution

The former bom.com points to advantages of Web-based product lifecycle management solution

Mountain View, CA — December 2, 2003 — Product lifecycle management specialist Arena Solutions this week touted the signing of the 100th customer for the company's flagship online PLM solution.

Arena, formerly known as bom.com, said that currently more than 100 manufacturers in industries ranging from electronics and medical devices to consumer products, automotive suppliers and industrial equipment are using the provider's Web-based system for managing product data.

Recent customers for the subscription-based solution include medical devices company Align Technology, networking solutions provider Caymas Systems, consumer products company Radio Systems and automotive supplier Superlift Suspensions.

"This is an exciting milestone for Arena Solutions," said Michael Topolovac, CEO of Arena. "Over the past two years, we have succeeded in building an impressive customer list, increasing our average order size and recording double-digit increases in sales each quarter, making us the fastest growing PLM company today."

Topolovac compared Arena's success to that of salesforce.com, a customer relationship management solution provider that also has adopted the model of delivering enterprise software through the Internet.

Arena said that because of its solution's Web-native architecture, customers can deploy the software in a matter of days. The solution provides original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and their designated partners and suppliers with secure, universal accessibility to the application as a way of collaborating on product data throughout the product lifecycle.

Chris Mainini, vice president of product development of Radio Systems, manufacturers of the PetSafe product line, said that his company went with Arena for PLM because the solution helped get the company's products to market faster by managing complex bills of material (BOMs) and reducing mistakes.

"With two development sites, five contract manufacturers and a large number of suppliers, we needed a global system to keep everyone synchronized real-time and grow our business," Mainini said. "We used to use a homegrown database to manage BOMs, but we realized the IT support to manage the system had become disproportionate to its benefits."

With the company growing and the complexity of its new products increasing, Radio Systems opted to try the Web-based system that Arena offered. "With more people getting involved in development and operations, I needed to institute a better system quickly," Mainini said. "Arena PLM has all the functionality we need, is a fully hosted, zero-IT solution and is very intuitive to learn."

Latest