Mountain View, CA January 16, 2003 bom.com, a provider of online product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions, this week announced it has officially changed its corporate name to Arena Solutions, effective immediately. Additionally, the re-named provider introduced its strategy for integrating its Arena PLM solution with complementary applications so that users can reconcile product data managed in Arena PLM with other specialized types of product data authored in different enterprise systems.
Since an "arena" is a place where teams come together, the provider said its new name reflects the company's direction to help customers achieve competitive advantage through collaborative online solutions.
Arena said PLM has grown in importance as time-to-market and competitive pressures have made manufacturing more complex. Citing research from AMR, the company explained that PLM provides a centralized system of record for all product data, and it is a system that can understand and provide visibility into the types of product data that are authored and stored in enterprise resource planning (ERP), mechanical computer-aided design (MCAD) and electronic design automation (EDA) tools.
"PLM is the next long, difficult, but essential information technology deployment facing industry, and AMR has found that 27 percent of business users agreed that PLM was the enterprise application with the biggest influence on overall business," said Kevin O'Marah, vice president of AMR Research, recalling a December 2002 AMR Research Alert.
Along with the new name, Arena Solutions said it would provide customers with a PLM solution through an expanded product line and an application integration strategy. The expanded Arena PLM solution combines the company's current and future products under one brand.
Arena PLM contains three application suites Product Arena, Sourcing & Costing Arena and Integration Arena each with range of modules to meet specific customer needs. Arena Solutions also unveiled an extensive strategy for integrating Arena PLM with complementary software applications in order to enable real-time information exchange between Arena PLM and ERP, MCAD and EDA systems.
"Today's manufacturers face challenges of unprecedented complexity as development schedules accelerate, quality requirements proliferate, and teams are increasingly distributed across the supply chain and around the world," said Michael Topolovac, CEO of Arena Solutions. "Arena PLM centralizes the product data created and used by these extended teams. Our strategy to integrate Arena PLM with complementary applications will give the entire enterprise even greater insight into their products meaning our customers can better understand the implications of their decisions before they're implemented."
