At ACE 2024 in Fort Worth, Roque Martin introduced our Build with Aras program – our bold new initiative to equip our community of builders with the knowledge, tools, and resources they need to create real value on the Aras platform. Fast forward to this year’s ACE in Boston, and we set out to prove just how serious we are. Our goal? To show partners, customers, and industry analysts alike that we’re not only addressing major challenges across the industry—but doing so with the speed and flexibility to return only a year later with more exciting news to share.

To help make that a reality, in the middle of last year, I took on a new role at Aras, focusing on the important mission of championing Build with Aras with our partner community and growing the ecosystem of solutions we can provide to Aras subscribers.

So, how do we better promote this ecosystem of solutions available on the Aras platform? Through the new Aras Marketplace, of course! On Marketplace, you will see a wide range of available add-on solutions, including applications, connectors, and enterprise integrations. This includes solutions from our many partners as well as those directly from Aras. Many of these are solutions we’ve had for years, and some are brand new, but it’s now very easy to see everything that’s available in one place. Each solution entry includes a collection of images and videos, a detailed description, and important product information like supported Aras versions and languages. Clicking the “Get It” button tells you how to obtain the solution, whether from Aras or directly from the partner. In addition to add-ons, we also highlight our Powered by Aras solutions from partners like AVEVA, SAIC, and SteepGraph. These solutions satisfy customer demand in other domains and run on the same Aras platform technology.

Having add-ons and Powered by Aras solutions is nothing new for Aras; after all one of the hallmarks of Aras Innovator® is the ease in which you can build robust scalable applications on our low-code platform (and if you don’t believe me, go check how many “Powered by XYZ” solutions our PLM competitors have!). The difference is the new Build with Aras mindset. The genesis of Build with Aras came from a product strategy discussion about a year and a half ago, where we concluded that it’s not realistic for Aras to directly address all the diverse application domains where our customers require solutions. This is the “cultural revolution” of Build with Aras that Roque referred to in his ACE keynote last year. These new Marketplace solutions extend the breadth of what you can do on the Aras platform, supplementing what Igal Kaptsan and the product management team are delivering in the standard product.

What’s exciting to me about this new mindset and my role in this effort is bringing new applications and industry solutions to our customers. We already have three of these types of solutions to offer, all of which are from partners who are first-time contributors:

  1. The Food & Beverage solution from Fulvisol, which helps users manage recipes, ingredients, finished goods, and distribution
  2. The Productization solution from Aficient, which leverages the variant capabilities in our platform to drive a Configure-to-Order process.
  3. The RIM – Regulatory Information Management from mediatec.net, which streamlines your regulatory compliance activities.

And there’s more like this in the pipeline and coming soon.

If you are an existing Aras customer or a company searching for your next PLM or digital thread solution, please check out the Marketplace to see everything we have available to help you solve your business challenges. I bet you’ll find some things you never knew Aras could provide.

And if you have ideas for other things we could offer, please reach out, and I’m sure I can find a willing partner to fill that need.

 

 

 

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ACE Aras Insights Digital Engineering