CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
24 February 2010
Company News
Arena Solutions Celebrates 10 Years of Providing On-Demand Bill of Materials (BOM) and Change Management Software in the Cloud
Arena Solutions announced that this month marks the company's 10th year of offering enterprise-class bill of materials (BOM) and change management software in the cloud. Informed by a decade of experience, Arena now makes it easier than ever for companies to get started with Arena, helping the average new customer get up and running, with its data in the system, in less than five days.
Arena Solutions (then known as bom.com) incorporated in February 2000, signed its first pilot customers months later and rolled out the Arena application (also originally called bom.com) to the wider market in June 2001. In 10 years the company has issued 53 major releases of its software and hundreds of minor releases. And because Arena is an on-demand, cloud-based system, every upgrade is automatically available to every single Arena customer as soon as it is released.
"I'm proud to look back and say that we're doing exactly what we set out to do," said Eric Larkin, co-founder and chief technology officer of Arena Solutions. "When we were getting started, we encountered a lot of skepticism about our plans to offer software in the cloud. Although other on-demand software providers like salesforce.com and NetSuite (then NetLedger) were getting started then, no one had yet proved that businesses would accept software-as-a-service (SaaS) in any significant numbers. But we were convinced that companies were ready for the unmatched advantages of on-demand enterprise applications -- benefits like rapid deployments; automatic upgrades; no software, hardware or IT investment; and a low total cost of ownership (TCO). The cloud was also the only way to offer the core functionality that makes Arena both unique and extremely valuable: true out-of-the box collaboration between manufacturers and their global supply chains. We may have been a little bit ahead of our time 10 years ago, but proof of on-demand acceptance has come since then: customers have adopted, on-demand software providers have succeeded, traditional software companies like Microsoft have pushed into the cloud and financial institutions like Goldman Sachs have acknowledged an 'unstoppable shift to SaaS.'"
Thousands of users have put Arena to the test over the last decade, with customers' employees, partners and suppliers logging in more than 12.2 million times to manage vast amounts of product data. Arena customers have collaborated with their manufacturing partners to develop 665,000 assemblies in the system and manage the 2.75 million different parts, subassemblies and other items that get used across those assemblies. Arena customers have used 155,000 suppliers and their 2.2 million different parts, and they've managed 1.7 million datasheets, assembly instructions, training records and other documents to support new product development (NPD), new product introduction (NPI) and the rest of the product design and manufacturing process. Arena has ensured the constant availability of its service throughout that time by delivering 99.98% lifetime uptime and allowing less than four minutes of unscheduled downtime in the last year.
The value companies derive from Arena can be seen in the results. On average, Arena customers design products 35% faster -- and reduce the cost of those products by 18%. They also see gains like 75% faster change order cycle times, 22% savings in change management and outsourcing costs and 20% faster time to revenue. Those benefits add up and pay off, propelling Arena customers to achieve product wins, company growth and successful outcomes. Many companies become Arena customers as young start-ups and then grow into public companies or prized acquisition targets. In the last few years alone, IPOs and purchases of Arena customers by companies like Philips, Cisco and EMC have generated more than $4.5 billion for those customers and their investors and owners.
Become a member of the CIMdata PLM Community to receive your daily PLM news and much more.
Tell us what you think of the CIMdata Newsletter. Send your feedback.
CIMdata is committed to your privacy. Your personal information will never be sold or shared outside of CIMdata without your express permission.