“Powered by Aras” has been making news the past of couple weeks.
I’m referring to both the announcement on January 14th: Aras Licenses Platform to ANSYS in Strategic OEM Deal and the one on January 23rd: Aras and Minerva Group Announce Strategic Partnership for Best Practice Industry PLM Solution.
ANSYS is leveraging Aras’ resilient platform services to deliver an offering called ANSYS Minerva. This provides offerings for simulation process and data management (SPDM), process integration, design optimization, and simulation-driven data science.
Minerva Group, the long-time Aras reseller, will leverage the Aras platform to deliver Minerva PLM to small and medium-sized companies. Minerva PLM will offer many of the Aras applications as well as their own. However, some applications, such as Aras Simulation Management and the Aras Maintenance Management applications, will not be included. Customers will be supported directly by Minerva PLM.
Roman Goddess of Wisdom? (Hint: It’s not Aras)
You are correct— it’s Minerva.
Why is the Roman Goddess of Wisdom getting so much attention?
It’s pure coincidence that ANSYS named their SPDM solution “Minerva,” and the Minerva Group, which has been around for 25 years, is named after her.
When people think of Aras, they think “open, flexible, scalable and upgradable,” which describes the Aras platform—Aras Innovator—perfectly. Except what is often overlooked, is that it’s a real platform—an industrial low-code platform that you can build enterprise applications on.
We don’t need no stinking badges!
Well, you do need a real platform.
I say, “Leave the traditional PLM; take the open, resilient platform.”
Others throw around the “platform” term as if they actually have one. For instance, they will say they have a “business platform,” but the reality is that it’s a collection of products, very often on different technology stacks, that: 1) do not access a common set of platform services, 2) are not development platforms, and 3) it can’t be a development platform with closed APIs.
Aras is a single platform with services and a modeling engine that allows you to build enterprise applications, customize applications, connect to other systems, or use the open Aras applications built on top of the Aras Innovator platform. This is why we at Aras will perform the upgrades, including all customizations, as part of the subscription (no additional charge). Can you imagine having another PLM vendor upgrade you and all customizations for no additional charge?
That could get messy, be expensive, and take a long time…. that is, if they could do it all?
Powered by Aras
“Powered by Aras” is the logical outcome of allowing others to OEM in their areas of expertise, building on top of our open platform, so they can take advantage of an open resilient platform like our Aras customers can.
This is the first thing I noticed when using Aras. I started by modeling a non-PLM application and wondered why other software companies would keep acquiring products on different technology stacks that were supposed to work together, with no real strategy to work on a common, open platform. The answer is to make money of course, possibly fill in some holes, but eventually this bites everyone.
Why is platform technology so important?
According to CIMdata, “Aras’ open ecosystem strategy helps partners leverage, and even incorporate Aras technology in their own solutions. This approach enables customers to adopt a platform approach within their digital transformation initiatives which gives them confidence that they will be able to adapt their product lifecycle solutions to future challenges. The beauty of this strategy is that partners, ISVs, and customers can leverage the services to integrate and extend their solutions and the Aras platform.” (CIMdata, January 14, 2020)
Industrial Low-code Platform
Not to belabor the point, but Aras is both an end-to-end PLM solution with many applications, and an industrial low-code platform. According to Verdi Ogewell, “ANSYS’ choice of Aras’ PLM technology also actualizes the Aras Innovator platform. Innovator is a low-code solution, meaning that you don’t need to use a lot of code to program, run and adapt it, which increases simplicity in implementation, usage and upgrading.” (Verdi Orgewell, Engineering.com January, 2020)
Verdi Ogewell does an excellent job covering why ANSYS chose Aras, which I encourage you to read: Why ANSYS Bet on Aras PLM Technology, and Why Aras Tends to Become a “Silent Partner” (Verdi Ogewell, Engineering.com, January 2020)
As always, I look forward to any of your comments.