Aras Doubles Up To Address Cloud, Holistic Systems Design

Aras, quietly behind a series of firsts in the PLM industry, just made a pair of announcements that address two of the biggest and most current trends: Simplifying the design of complex products involving PCB components and helping organizations move product design data safely into the cloud.

To address the challenges of designing and building complex products, Aras rolled out a partnership with Altium, one of the big players in electronic design automation (EDA) software. Their work together is squarely aimed at building tighter integration between the different engineering disciplines — electrical design being the hallmark of this deal — giving the Aras Innovator PLM platform more depth in the area of holistic systems design.

The pair did some joint integration work to allow engineers working on complex products with electronics components to access Altium PCB (printed circuit board) design data directly from within Aras Innovator PLM. The key differentiator from past integrations is that Aras Innovator is now connected to Altium Vault, the company’s centralized database for ECAD design data (think PDM for electronics data), which means organizations can now manage a multidisciplinary bill of materials along with all the enterprise-level configuration, and change and requirements management tasks that go with it.

Integration between Altium Vault and Aras Innovator sets the stage for holistic systems design. Image Courtesy of Aras

By improving collaboration across electrical, mechanical and software disciplines, Aras aims to help engineers efficiently manage the product lifecycle from requirements through design, manufacture and service. Through this seamless ECAD and MCAD integration, engineering organizations can achieve full product visibility and cross-discipline collaboration as opposed to the traditional way of working within the constraints of departmental and functional silos.

“One of the things driving businesses towards us is that we are helping companies with legacy PLM systems integrate more effectively into world of ECAD and software development,” said Doug MacDonald, product marketing manager at Aras. “Rather than trying to build direct integrations with ECAD tools, enterprises are choosing to use Aras as the integration point, leveraging our ability to have multidisciplinary BOMs and multiple views of product configuration data throughout the lifecycle.”

The Altium/Aras integration allows for the seamless bi-directional transfer of released design and manufacturing data between Altium and the Aras PLM platform, including management of electromechanical BOM configurations, full synchronization of lifecycle states and unified control of release revisions and the greater change management process.

A PLM Appliance

In other news, Aras took steps to round out Aras Innovator’s cloud story. The company is partnering with CloudSAFE to offer a pre-packaged PLM infrastructure appliance, designed to serve as a scalable, ready-to-run PLM solution. The CloudSAFE PLM Appliance, which includes cloud-based back-up and disaster recovery capabilities, is the first in a line of new pre-packaged PLM infrastructure and cloud-based appliances built on Aras Innovator that are optimized for performance, reliability and security. The CloudSAFE PLM appliance can be deployed in a public or private cloud or be configured to run as a hybrid model.

The appliance, which encapsulates a complete Aras environment, is designed to help companies get up and running in the cloud quickly, leveraging the remote management and support services offered by CloudSAFE to minimize any impact on internal IT staffs.

“CloudSAFE is part of the Aras deployment strategy to allow customers to work in their chosen environment — on-premise, in a public or private cloud or in a hybrid model, with experienced partners who deliver secure, flexible, scalable options,” said Jay Pappas, vice president of Global Alliances at Aras, in a press release.”

Check out this video to do a deep dive into Aras Innovator 11, the latest release of the PLM platform.

And to learn more about what Altium Vault is all about, watch this video.