Arena Solutions: Unlocking the True Potential of Product Lifecycle Management Date:   Wednesday , October 08, 2014 Rewinding back a decade, there were few solutions available to help businesses meet their goals around PLM (Product Lifecycle Management). Most were either paper based or so expensive that smaller companies could not afford them. Outsourcing back then also involved time consuming channels of data sharing and communication with the contract manufacturers. As time moved on, increased competition has taken the manufacturing industry to those echelons where organizations must learn to innovate quickly, fail quickly and learn from failure quickly. Businesses are forced to bring their products to market rapidly while controlling cost and driving profits all without compromising quality. Modern businesses increasingly needed to share product data with a large number of internal and external stakeholders which proved to be a daunting task with on-premise PLM solutions. Anticipating market need, Arena Solutions invented the world\'s first cloud-native PLM in 2000. The California based company redefined the PLM space with a suite of multi-tenant cloud applications that enabled engineering, manufacturing, and their extended supply chains to work in unison?from prototype to production. Co-founded by Michael Topolovac and Eric Larkin in February 2000, Arena Solutions was originally named \'bom.com\', a web-based application for managing items, bills of material (BOMs), and engineering changes. Today, Arena Solutions offers a rich suite of products targeted at manufacturers and their supply chains. These solutions facilitate manufacturers to manage bills of materials (BOMs), Engineering Change Orders (ECOs), product data exchange (PDX), and other key manufacturing files securely and efficiently all while being welded in tightly with the product record while easing collaboration with their extended supply chain. With products integrated with other manufacturing services such as MCAD, EDA, PDM and ERP, Arena is able to help organizations reach a point where they can speed prototyping, reduce scrap, streamline their supply chain, improve margins and collapse time to market. Enabling Changes that are Quick and Inexpensive For manufacturers, reaching a blend that melds three key purposes; low cost and high margins, faster time to market, and greater product quality, nearly seems impossible. If they focus solely on margins to the detriment of quality, it mars the brand long term. Alternatively, if there is an obsession over quality which exceeds business norms, it will extend time to market, lower barriers to entry and open up market windows of opportunity for competitors to gain \'first-mover\' advantage. However, when the organization focuses solely on reducing time to market, it oftentimes misses their margins because of cost overruns due to less cross-functional coordination and not allowing a few healthy iterations of \'freedom to fail\', which could have resulted in improved innovation and reduced cost?well before product launch. Well aware of these harsh realities and the differing and competing plate spinning required, Arena provides PLM solutions at a cost seventy five percent lower than competitors as well as implementing and deploying five times faster. \"We give organizations the ability to share relevant information early in the process. Changes are inexpensive and people who manufacture the product can offer feedback months in advance, resulting in quick changes which manifest themselves in an improved product long term. We enable everybody to see all the issues?all the time?and learn from them.\" says Craig Livingston, Chairman & CEO, Arena Solutions. Holding an Edge Arena do not only differentiates itself as being the most affordable PLM for global enterprise solutions, but also the easiest to implement. \"What also sets us apart from competing PLM solutions is our ever expanding robust feature-set which meets the unique manufacturing challenges facing OEMs in many differing verticals,\" adds Craig. What Next? Arena has been able to grow its revenue at nearly 25 percent for Q2 2014 compared to the same period in the previous year. This rate of growth is over four times faster than the growth rate for the PLM market as a whole. The company nurtures a strong growing team as evidenced by its employee growth which also witnessed a 25 percent increase over the same period last year. To accommodate this growth, it\'s moving its headquarters again?for the second time in two years?while planning geographical expansion outside the U.S. The SMB market is already well aware of Arena and actively engaged. The previously best-kept-secret in California however is officially out to the global enterprise. Increasingly, large enterprises with existing on-premise PLM solutions who want to move to the cloud and turn their six?or even seven?figure spend into a fraction of that discomfort are considering Arena. Panel Products: Cloud-based/SaaS applications under the Arena PLM umbrella: Arena BOMControl, Arena Quality, Arena Projects, Arena Demand and Arena Exchange. Clients: Nutanix, Pluribus, Fitbit, Ruckus Wireless, TrueNorth Avionics, Yesco, GoPro and many others Recognitions: 1.Ranked among Top 10 PLM Provider 2.Top 5 Supplier Collaboration solution 3.Holds a spot on the San Francisco Business Times\' Best Places to Work List for 2013 Management Craig Livingston, Chairman & CEO Prior to joining Arena, Craig served as vice president and general manager of the SME Solutions division of PLM provider Agile Software. His success in that role helped propel Agile to strong growth and a successful acquisition by Oracle. He had also held various significant positions and worked with organizations such as think3, PeopleSoft, CCI-Triad and Borland that laid the foundation of Craig\'s thorough understanding of the needs of mid-market manufacturers.