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CIMdata's Vice President, Stan Przybylinski, recently sat down with Mark Reisig, VP of Product Marketing for Aras, so that he could learn more about the company's cloud strategy.
Let's find out!
How important are cloud-based solutions to the strategy of Aras?
It’s critical to both our customers and Aras. As many companies look to cloud-first strategies to take advantage of all the cloud offers, we see an increasing number of customers migrating their on-premise PLM deployment to the cloud, as well as a growing number of new customers implementing their initial PLM deployment in the cloud. This is definitely a growth area for us. Since our platform is specifically designed to adapt to new technology quickly, our customers have high expectations for painless cloud migrations.
Cloud impacts our overall business strategy, our business functionality, and our technical strategy as well. As a company strategy, Aras provides customer options to fulfill the most complex business requirements. This includes having the necessary cloud technology and services when they need it.
Functionally, we see the role of PLM continuing to expand across the enterprise. The need to easily use information from many applications across the enterprise is central to PLM and a company’s ability to transform its product ecosystem and business continuously. We see cloud-based solutions as an enabler for organizations to better share data and widen the scope of available information to improve end-to-end business processes.
This also aligns with our Systems Thinking strategy for Digital Transformation and Digital Thread. The strategy views Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) as central to managing design complexities. It also sees the resulting systems model as an authoritative design intent that acts as connective tissue between all other design domains. That thinking requires connecting yet another engineering silo (MBSE) with the rest of the design domains, putting even more importance on data federation that crosses organizational and supplier boundaries. Aras believes that the cloud offers the most flexible and most effective approach to such federation.
Since Aras Innovator is built on an open architecture in the cloud to share data from many sources easily, it makes data sharing across applications easier and supports even more dynamic use cases. For example, our Dynamic Product Navigation (DPN) functionality in the cloud enables companies to view and edit their products that originate from multiple CAD sources. Allowing enterprise users to quickly collaborate and manipulate their product in the cloud supports Aras’ CAD-agnostic strategy.
Can you describe the ecosystem of infrastructure, applications, and other partners that are part of your offerings?
Aras Cloud offers a comprehensive SaaS solution with the Enterprise offering, complete with the capability for unlimited customization and development of industrial-grade low-code enterprise applications supported by DevOps processes, software, and automated test regression. Subscribers can run on both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) hyperscaler cloud infrastructures, as well as a wide variety of private cloud providers such as T-Systems and others. All Aras partner applications work the same in cloud, hybrid, or on-premise deployments. This includes integration connectors, add-on applications, industry templates, and other solutions for Aras Innovator.
Aras global systems integration partners such as Capgemini, Accenture, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL, and others are all skilled at deploying Aras in the cloud.
How does your solution and its go-to-market address the issues raised by your customers and prospects (e.g., packaging, licensing, deployment options)?
Aras continues to provide a simple, transparent go-to-market SaaS model of Aras Innovator, which is both an Enterprise PLM and an industrial-grade low-code platform. We have always focused our go-to-market strategy on our customers’ needs. Our subscription pricing is based on a tiered number of users, which includes all the Aras applications, low-code modeling engine, and rich platform services that can be used to customize or build applications. All customizations and new customer applications are guaranteed upgradable, so customers never have to rebuild their solutions just to move forward with an upgrade. We include 7x24 support, unlimited training, and upgrades delivered based on our customer’s schedule.
Aras Cloud SaaS keeps that same simplified go-to-market strategy. The model enables Aras and our customers to share risk in a more equitable fashion. Since we do not sell additional applications, we must always be focused on our customers and their most important issues to provide value with the right functionality. We introduced four new products in 2020 and released service packs that included major functionality. These were all included in the subscription. If our customers are successful and expand, Aras is then rewarded. We also need to continually upgrade our customers including, all their customizations, which creates a closer, more collaborative, and transparent relationship.
There are three flavors of Aras Innovator. The first is our free option. Aras offers a free download of the Aras Innovator software that includes all of our applications for customers to use. We feel the only way prospective customers can have absolute confidence that the solution delivers what they need is to use it first-hand. We’re the only PLM provider to offer this option.
We’ve heard frustration from our competitors’ customers about how complicated their license agreements are. Unplanned license costs to use new applications or sometimes even new functionality can irritate customers as they advance their PLM strategy.
The Aras Innovator Standard Subscription includes all Aras Innovator applications, the low-code modeling engine, and all of Aras’ platform services to support customizations and building new applications without limits.
Providing the ability to customize the environment is a major issue raised by customers. Aras continues to support unlimited customizations with our low-code modeling engine, ensuring that the enhancements do not interfere with our upgrade process. We execute the upgrade for our customers under subscription—on their schedule.
The Aras Innovator platform can be deployed in the cloud, on-premise, or using a hybrid environment. Customers can choose to develop and deploy their systems themselves, with Aras Professional Services, or with one of Aras’ many partners.
The third option is our Aras Enterprise SaaS offering. With SaaS, subscribers receive the same Aras Innovator platform and capabilities that are delivered with an on-premise deployment. This means unlimited customization, guaranteed upgrades, including all customization, 7x24 support, and unlimited training. The SaaS option includes managed services of the Aras Innovator environment, from establishing the customer’s dedicated cloud to the day-to-day operations all delivered by Aras’ Global Cloud Services team. Since we expect and encourage our customers to customize and build new solutions, we also include our own DevOps tools and processes with automated regression testing to ensure disciplined deployments. Since Aras SaaS is on the customer’s dedicated environment, we also offer personalized performance tuned to meet their workload.
How would you describe your primary target customers (e.g., startups, small to medium-sized enterprises, anyone)?
Simple. Our primary customers are the largest, most complex enterprises supporting their engineering, manufacturing, and maintenance requirements. Our powerful platform-based solution is designed to scale to handle the heaviest workload in an operationally simplified manner.
Microsoft is a great example of a large company with a variety of complex products that uses Aras in the cloud. Aras Innovator is the only Microsoft enterprise PLM solution that services both the Devices group (Surface, Xbox, etc.) and the Cloud group (Azure blades and racks). Aras is used to build and maintain the configurations of all physical products and deliver these configurations to the Microsoft contract manufacturing plants. Microsoft has been an Aras customer for over five years and has used an Azure cloud deployment for two years. Microsoft has over 5,000 users and continues to work with Aras as we develop new functionality.
Can you provide any information on your installed base that are in production: how many customers, their industries, etc.? How well has it been growing recently, and what do you expect over the next 2-5 years?
Aras customers use cloud deployments in a range of industries, including aerospace, automotive, energy, heavy industry, high-tech, shipbuilding, and medical devices.
Aras saw continued growth in demand for cloud in 2019 and 2020, with customers deploying in cloud at increased rates due to COVID-19 pandemic requirements for remote administration and management. Aras expects year-over-year (YoY) cloud growth in 2020 to be over 100%. In the next two years, we expect to continue YoY cloud growth between 100% – 150%. Over the next five years, we expect the majority of new customers to run cloud deployments.
How are your offerings going to evolve in the short to medium term (1-3 years) – what are the primary themes/strategy on your roadmap?
Aras plans to continue extending its low-code platform technology advantage by further advancing the solution modeling capabilities for complex industrial scenarios. Roadmap themes include Systems Thinking (Requirements Engineering, Systems Architecture, MBSE & Simulation Management), Digital Twin, and Digital Thread across the lifecycle for cross-discipline engineering, manufacturing, and maintenance for the largest global enterprises. All of these solutions are in the cloud with the same functionality as an on-premise deployment.
We have been delivering high-quality releases every six weeks for over a year and added four new applications in 2020. In 2021, we expect the cadence of these releases to be every four weeks. Aras’ roadmap can be found on the website.
One of our primary themes is to continually provide new options so our customers can adjust to new business strategies as conditions change. For instance, as we move forward, we are ensuring our solution offers the same platform, applications, and functionality across any type of deployment, so customers have the portability to move between deployment types if business conditions demand it.
Inherent to the Aras Innovator Platform is a digital thread with many platform services such as Visual Collaboration, Dynamic Product Navigation, and Graph Navigation, to name a few, that enable users to collaborate securely in the context of the product across functional domains, the product’s lifecycle, and the extended enterprise. The world is getting far too complex, and change is only accelerating. Aras is adding capabilities that enable companies to gain efficiencies and improve quality and innovation with increased collaborative capabilities across the digital thread. We are already beginning to move beyond managing data to managing design intent, which as products become more complex and connected, is critical to connecting diverse models and using automated intelligence to drive even greater efficiencies and innovations.
We look forward to hearing your comments.
Stan
This blog post is part of a collaborative research program on adoption and use of cloud/SaaS PLM solutions. CIMdata is looking for industrial respondents for a survey that CIMdata is running on this topic: [Take the Survey]
