I’ve been visited Aras Corp. office yesterday night. Marc Lind, Aras VP Marketing invited me to join Aras Open House celebration of new office. Aras Corp. located in Andover, Mass stays outside PLM highway, but still relatively close to my place. In addition to having a Aras office tour with Marc Lind, I had a chance to speak with other members of Aras team and guests.
New office and new plans
Aras has very ambition plans for 2012. Quoting Marc Lind, Aras plans to double headcount of their worldwide employees. From what I’ve seen, Aras has lots of empty seats in the office. So, you want to send your resume to Aras – it is a time to apply your resume (:)).
The layout of the office contains lots of open space. Following my previous conversation with Jeff Ray during my visit to new Dassault System office in Waltham, MA, I can see it as a trend among the companies to cultivate collaboration and team work.
Open Source and Different PLM
I was tracking Aras PLM for last few years. You probably had a chance to read some of my posts about Aras. The main message I’ve heard back last year and before was about Enterprise Open Source. Aras differentiated themselves as a PLM company using Open Source and Free license distribution model. This time, I’ve heard a slightly different story. In a nutshell, it sounds like “Aras is different PLM”. What stands behind? Aras claims it is about technology, business model and attitude. According to the members of Aras team, Aras technology is competitive against TeamCenter, Enovia and Windchill- major PLM vendors. Enterprise Open source business model allows to them to decrease cost of sales and build community of customers and partners.
What is my conclusion? I found Aras more focused on the competition with major PLM suppliers – TeamCenter, Enovia and Windchill than before. To me, it is good and bad signs at the same time. It is presents the level of maturity of Aras platform and solutions – it is interesting to see how emerging platform like Aras can compete with mature products coming from large top 3 PLM vendors. Even so, I’d like to hear more about Aras community. I found some community examples such as “feature roadmap voting” interesting. However, I haven’t seen any public numbers about how Aras community is growing. Strong community base can become a much stronger competitive factor for Aras than a feature by feature comparison with TeamCenter and other PLM vendors. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
Freebie. Aras didn’t pay me to write this post. However, I enjoyed free food and beverages during Aras reception.
