Why On-Demand?

Benefit of Arena On-Demand PLM:

• Continuous Innovation: Immediate availability of latest releases with substantial new features.
• Lowest Total-Cost-of-Ownership: No hardware or IT staff required, affordable subscription pricing.
• Instant On: Fast initial deployment, no waiting for upgrades and new features.
• Always On: Demonstrated persistent availability of 99.95%, or around 4 hours of unscheduled downtime per year, for the past 5 years.
• Ultra-High Security: Financial-grade infrastructure—accessing your data is as safe as accessing bank accounts via an automated teller machine.
• No Hassle Collaboration: Global access by you and your designated partners / suppliers to collaborative work processes using only a web browser and Internet connection.
• Flexibility and Scalability: Easy to add unlimited users at any time.

 

The On-Demand Business Model
Arena’s innovative architecture provides significant advantages to our customers. By focusing our development resources on a single, global instance of the software, Arena can innovate faster than traditional enterprise software vendors who need to manage many released versions of software on various technology stacks (i.e., different combinations of operating systems, databases, and middleware) across hundreds or thousands of unique customer deployments. We focus development, support, and implementation resources on a single version of software and pass along sustainable cost advantages to our customers.

 

Demonstrated High System Availability and Security
By focusing resources on a single system, Arena customers enjoy the same high availability and financial-grade security as leading financial institutions. Arena incorporates proven technologies to ensure ultra-high security while providing near continuous system availability—accessible anywhere, anytime, from a standard Web browser and Internet connection. This provides our customers complete failover protection and security far beyond what is practical in most on-premise deployments or separate-instance hosted applications.

 

Viral Adoption Through the Supply Network
Arena PLM provides customers the flexibility to tailor their workspace environment according to their own needs and provides them the scalability to add a virtually unlimited number of suppliers or partners. Unlike traditional software systems, there are no clumsy behind-the-firewall access rights to configure and manage each time you add or remove a user. Instead, you use convenient administration tools to specify role-based access for employees, suppliers and business partner users.

As a result, Arena customers routinely invite and/or remove suppliers through simple registration and user administration procedures. Since our inception, Arena’s easy adoption has built a virtual community comprised of hundreds of suppliers and contract manufacturers who use Arena PLM to help our customers build superior products. Odds are that your suppliers will already be familiar with and ready to use Arena PLM to help in your design or outsourcing initiatives.

 

Instant Updates to Latest Release Level
Updates and improvements to Arena PLM are routinely applied without service interruption and are instantly available to all customers. Consequently, Arena PLM customers are never version-locked on old releases and left paying maintenance for only telephone support and bug fixes. In fact, our ability to continually make adjustments and fixes that are immediately available to 100% of our customers results in very high software quality.

 

Continuous Innovation
Compared with traditional software vendors who deliver major releases approximately every 18-24 months, Arena delivers several major releases per year, giving customers constant software innovation with significant new functionality. Users drive much of the product roadmap and usability improvements by contributing suggestions and requests via the “fast feedback” feature that instantly links users directly to Arena’s support and development teams. This easy and accessible communication tool helps align functionality with the current and evolving business needs of our customers. Arena also evaluates live usage so we can help you identify how to derive maximum value from the application and determine how best to focus our own investments in product development. This Arena Metric Profile provides a detailed look into monthly usage patterns and is the only offering of its kind in the industry.

 

Rate of Innovation

 

Lowest Total Cost of Ownership
Arena allows companies of all sizes to achieve the benefits of PLM without paying the extensive up-front costs associated with traditional systems. With Arena PLM, your investment is continually aligned with realized value. And, as illustrated above, these benefits can include lower costs, more efficient production hand-offs, faster market introductions, and improved profitability across an extended product lifecycle.

As you begin to expand usage of Arena PLM, you can incrementally add many or just a few users according to your needs. This natural alignment of your business needs to our value proposition via the subscription model is another reason Arena is focused on continuous customer service and a continuing business relationship—that’s why Arena’s customers renew their subscriptions more than 95% of the time.

By comparison, traditional software applications typically require a large commitment of time and money to license, deploy and maintain software (illustrated below). For traditional software vendors, this makes new customers more valuable than existing customers, creating a natural premium on customer acquisition versus retention. And, over time, maintenance-paying customers can rack up big numbers in fees as high as 22% of inflated list price values. Some customers get left behind by the release cycle. They end up paying maintenance for bug fixes on old software that is no longer compatible with latest releases, and eventually need to focus their own resources on redeploying systems and retraining users.

 

The Convergence of On-Demand Services
Traditional business applications have long promised “seamless” integration between separate enterprise systems. The promise continues in the latest tool-kit approaches to systems integration via Service Oriented Architecture. Unfortunately, the cost, technical expertise and complexity of using even the best of these tool kits to interconnect traditional systems presents significant obstacles to adoption.

Because it’s designed to take advantage of the Internet, Arena’s single instance, multi-tenant SaaS architecture addresses these obstacles head on. Our technology allows us to easily map data structures and manage integrations to other on-demand services. We’ve taken the first few steps to leverage this advantage by enabling Arena PLM for Avnet Prómiere and for Skype software—delivering component reference content and integrated voice and text chat to the user desktop. And, since all Arena customers use a single version of our latest software, these offerings are instantly available to any user. But, this is only the start.

As companies continue to invest in SaaS offerings of all types and as vendors continue to introduce innovative new SaaS business applications, Arena continues to aggressively investigate new on-ramps for our on-demand community to complementary on-demand services. We see this natural convergence of on-demand services as our opportunity to drive accuracy and responsiveness into the core of our customers’ product and collaboration processes, enabling them to focus on building superior products while we manage their Arena PLM solution.

 

Summary
Arena PLM is delivered on-demand as a service, giving you the convenience of a single partner solution with no software to install and no IT infrastructure to maintain. A web browser and an Internet connection is all the technology you need, and it’s easy to use so you can focus resources on product innovation, not system training and administration.