Four companies tap Arena Solutions for on-demand product lifecycle management, see quick returns
Menlo Park, CA — January 5, 2005 — Arena Solutions Inc., a provider of on-demand product lifecycle management (PLM) services, today announced four customer deployments. The customers, AgileTV, Data Domain, Dust Networks and Hammerhead Systems, all said they were able to move their development teams and product data onto Arena in a matter of days, realizing immediate process improvements and faster returns on their investments.
Arena said that its on-demand PLM service requires no infrastructure or software installations by the customer, allowing companies to more quickly achieve collaboration across their entire design-through-manufacturing organization, including outsourced partners and suppliers. And because it can be accessed through a standard Web browser, global teams can instantly begin collaborating and sharing a real-time record of product information.
AgileTV, a developer of speech-enabled home entertainment systems, said it needed a PLM solution to manage product information and development processes across its entire offering, including remote controls, infrared receivers, communications equipment, software and servers. AgileTV's product allows cable television subscribers to use voice commands to select from the hundreds of channels and thousands of movies available on digital cable. Product lifecycle management is key to the company's ability to deliver its system to customers.
We selected Arena Solutions after spending several months evaluating a variety of offerings based on features such as ease-of-use, ease-of-deployment and total cost of ownership, said David Chaiken, chief technology officer of AgileTV Corp. Arena PLM is affordable, and we were able to start using it, getting the benefits of PLM control of our products within a very short period of time.
In the case of Data Domain, a provider of enterprise data protection solutions, the company was challenged with information complexity and data sharing issues across project teams, especially in working with outsourced suppliers on a daily basis, and needed a PLM solution for real-time and effective collaboration.
According to David Sangster, vice president of operations of Data Domain, as an emerging company, its success depends on its ability to execute on two fronts: rapid product development and cash management. Arena has helped us with both, he said. By providing a single, centralized database for managing product data, all our suppliers access the same up-to-date data from Arena, guaranteeing consistency of information. All changes are put through a review board, so our partners have appropriate visibility to pending changes. In some cases, they have provided feedback that helped us avoid making unnecessary and costly changes.
Sangster went on to say that with Arena's pay-per-use subscription model, Data Domain has avoided the cash outlay traditionally associated with client/server software. Because the architecture is Web based, Data Domain also avoided any IT and administrator investment. This has allowed us to maintain a lean organization and focus on what we do best — product development, Sangster commented. The ability to include product costs in our [bill of materials (BOMs)] has also sensitized our engineers to the impact of their design choices.
