A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Cloud PLM – to raise the stakes?

Cloud PLM – to raise the stakes?
Oleg
Oleg
31 August, 2017 | 3 min for reading

PLM news of the day – Arena Solutions Receives Strategic Growth Investment from JMI Equity. Founded back in 2000, Arena Solutions was pioneering the idea of “on demand” software today known as “cloud”.  Here is an interesting data point from press release about number of customers Arena has.

Founded in 2000, Arena invented cloud-based PLM and today provides an all-in-one product development platform that unites PLM, ALM, supply chain collaboration, and QMS for the design and manufacture of complex electronics. Its solution creates a collaborative development-to-production workflow tied to the product record that connects electrical, mechanical, and software engineers, allowing them to work seamlessly with product development, quality, and manufacturing teams. Arena’s platform is the system of record for streamlining these processes, delivering value to customers by helping improve product quality, reduce costs, and accelerate time to market. With users in over 125 countries, Arena has approximately 1,000 customers today, including Intuit, Citrix Systems, Nutanix, GoPro, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and eBay.

The amount of investment, valuation and other financial details are not disclosed. Verdi Ogewell’s article in Engineering.com – “PLM in the cloud is revolutionizing” – Equity firm JMI invests in Arena PLM coming with interesting financial assessments of cPDM vendors.

According to the article there are 2 groups of cPDM players – dominant players and smaller players.

The dominant players, such as Siemens PLM (Teamcenter suite), Dassault Systèmes (3DEXPERIENCE/Enovia), PTC (Windchill), SAP (SAP PLM) and Oracle (Agile PLM) where revenues range from Siemen’s PLM’s close to $2 billion to Oracle’s barely 800 million dollars.

The smaller players, such as Autodesk (specifically for the cPDm area and their cloud-PLM platform Fusion Lifecycle), Aras PLM (Innovator) and Arena (Arena PLM), all estimated to be below $100 million per year in revenue.

It seems to be not apples to apples comparison. $2B Siemens PLM’s revenues are including CAD, CAE and other business and not only cPDM. The following slide from CIMdata can bring an additional level of clarity. Even so, an average difference between dominant and small players in the market is 10x.

I’ve been playing with number a bit and here is my simple math. If Arena’s revenue is $80M then 1,000 customers are paying $80K annual subscription to Arena. With average cost of 80$ / user / month according to Arena Solution website can be calculated as 80-100 seats of Arena for every customer with an average $1K/seat annual subscription. In the world of cPDM, it can be considered as a very large business scale.

Engineering.com article speaks about Solidworks investment and acquisition as an example. That one is not completely aligned with cPDM segment. The last large cPDM segment exit was Matrix One, which was acquired by Dassault Systemes in 2006 for for $408M.  I’m going to attend Autodesk Accelerate 2017  (known as cloud PLM) event soon in Boston. Hope to get more numbers and data points from there.

What is my conclusion? Cloud and PLM are on the raise. With a growing complexity of product development, companies are looking how to manage it using reasonable priced software. Slightly disappointing factor is that none of smaller players in cPDM segment is publishing financial information. So, most of numbers above are only guesses. Can Arena make a future deal for JMI similar to what MatrixOne / Dassault? Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Want to learn more about PLM? Check out my new PLM Book website.

Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of openBoM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups and supply chain. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
4 September, 2012

I’m about to start my journey back from Israel to Boston after a short family vacation break. Below is probably...

5 November, 2010

Yesterday, I had the unique opportunity to participate in the webinar with a very intriguing name – Why Hasn’t PLM...

11 November, 2023

Let’s talk about the importance of digital transformation and the challenges that manufacturing companies are facing in product lifecycle management,...

13 February, 2018

How to build reliable PLM system? For long time, this topic is among the most often demanded requirement in engineering...

24 March, 2016

Collaboration is one of these magic words that often used by software vendors to explain value proposition of PDM and...

26 October, 2016

I’m planning to come to California next month to speak at Product Innovation conference which will take place at Orange...

19 January, 2025

As we step into 2025, I’ve been reflecting on the evolution of my blogging and changing I’m planning ahead. Let...

21 September, 2024

The Product Data Management Software (PDM) business, which started as a way to manage CAD (Computer Aided Design) files, is...

23 July, 2021

The world is more connected these days than ever before. Since COVID19 is in charge of digital transformation, millions of...

Blogroll

To the top