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Arena Solutions Launches New Edition of Its Award-Winning Arena PLM On-Demand Solution

Spring 06 Simplifies Integration, Enhances Security and Enriches Customer Experience for Improved Product Lifecycle Management

Foster City, Calif., June 5, 2006 — Arena Solutions, the leading provider of on-demand product lifecycle management software for manufacturers of all sizes, today announced the availability of Arena PLM Spring 06. The latest release of Arena’s award-winning on-demand PLM service dramatically simplifies how manufacturers integrate their Arena PLM solution with today’s most essential ERP, EDA and CAD applications by adding an integration layer into its PLM solution, enhancing access controls to provide customers with an even greater level of security and enabling a richer customer experience through personalized usage statistics and a new self-service portal for customer support.

“Arena is committed to providing its customers with the most powerful and secure platform for PLM,” said Michael Topolovac, CEO of Arena Solutions. “With Arena PLM Spring 06 we have taken that commitment to the next level by simplifying integration with today’s most popular ERP, EDA and CAD applications, adding another layer of security so our customers can now restrict access based on physical location as well as username and password, and providing real-time feedback so our customers can optimize their PLM experience.”

Arena PLM Spring 06 enhancements include:
A New Integration Layer
With Spring 06, Arena Solutions has added a new integration layer into its PLM application that enables simplified integration with today’s most essential ERP, CAD and EDA applications, including products from Oracle, Microsoft, Expandable, QAD, Cadence, Mentor Graphics, and SolidWorks. Through this new integration layer, manufacturers now have the option of using managed data synchronizations or off-the-shelf adaptor solutions to seamlessly integrate PLM product data with other enterprise applications such as ERP, MCAD and EDA. Managed data synchronizations, which include semi-automated workflows, allow customers who are just getting started with PLM or who make less frequent updates to their integration processes, to have a cost-effective and ‘out of the box’ solution for integrating their PLM data with other applications.

The integration layer also features a dashboard that allows users to transparently monitor and more easily manage which other applications are integrated with Arena PLM. In addition, the integration dashboard enables customers to easily publish specific subsets of PLM data to other enterprise systems. Now through the dashboard, customers can have real-time visibility into what other applications are integrated with Arena PLM and greater control of their product record data.

“As global outsourcing becomes more important to companies of all sizes, providing consistent access to all the information that affect product development becomes even more difficult to pull together and leverage for business decisions. In order to make this information more useful, product-related information from various, distributed enterprise systems needs to be integrated into a cohesive, managed ‘single version of the truth’ quickly and accurately,” said Ken Amann, Director of Research for CIMdata. “By incorporating an application integration layer directly within its PLM solution and including a dashboard for managing integration connections, Arena has provided their customers a significantly improved mechanism for product information to be communicated and synchronized with other enterprise applications.”

Enhanced Security
Arena PLM provides enhanced enterprise-class security through IP-based access control. Manufacturers can now restrict access to its Arena PLM solution based on log-in and IP address range. By adding a layer of security based on originating location, Arena PLM:

  • Provides for stronger security measures as well as more customized permissions.
  • Allows security and intellectual property conscious customers to control access to their IP on very specific “point of entry”.

Richer Customer Experience
Unlike traditional software solutions, Arena PLM is delivered on-demand as a secure, web-based Internet service enabling customers to take advantage of rapid, continuous innovation, a richer, AJAX-based user interface, increased reliability and security, and greater service performance. With Spring 06, Arena PLM now provides manufacturers with real-time, personalized usage information into application usage, feature utilization and support activity so they can maximize their PLM experience. In addition, through a custom, self-service portal manufacturers can now get real-time status updates on customer support issues. The portal is fully integrated with FastFeedback, a real-time support system that provides users with immediate technical assistance in the context of exactly where they are in the application. These unique benefits of on-demand PLM add up to greater productivity and competitive advantage for manufacturers and their global supply chain.

These enhancements follow on the heels of Arena’s recent announcement that all of its Arena PLM products are backed by a guaranteed service level agreement (SLA). Arena’s customers can expect to receive a minimum planned uptime and availability of 99.5% on its service or they will receive a credit against their subscription. As with all upgrades to Arena PLM, the Arena PLM SLA is effective immediately and free of charge for all Arena PLM customers. In addition, Arena Solutions now provides its customers with real-time access to network availability, uptime, and historical system performance through its public website http://www.arenasolutions.com/uptime.

About Arena Solutions

For over a decade, Arena has been redefining PLM with a suite of cloud applications that enable engineering, manufacturing and their extended supply chains to work better together—from first prototype to full-scale production. Arena helps innovative manufacturers bring better products to market faster with cloud PLM offerings that speed prototyping, reduce scrap and help manufacturers collaborate on product changes with strategic partners across the globe.

Arena cloud PLM products simplify bill of materials (BOM) and change management, and offer manufacturers the right balance of flexibility and control—at every point in the product lifecycle. PartsList and PDXViewer are lightweight single-user applications that allow manufacturers to move quickly and efficiently while designing, documenting and sharing a prototype. When scaling to production and beyond, the Arena core application provides full PLM functionality so manufacturers can control revisions, manage the engineering change process and selectively share accurate, up-to-date BOMs with partners, suppliers and contract manufacturers.

Founded in February 2000, Arena Solutions is headquartered in Foster City, California.

To learn more about Arena Solutions:

Contact:

Michelle LaVery
Arena Solutions
media@arenasolutions.com
1.650.513.3567

Arena and Arena Solutions are trademarks of Arena Solutions, Inc., Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. All rights reserved. Other product and company names are the property of their respective holders.