Lawson Acquires PLM Division of Freeborders

The influence of outside departments is not lost on ERP vendors. In February, Hardeep Gulati, vice president of PLM and PIM (product information management) at Oracle, briefed eWEEK on Oracle's PLM strategy for the coming year.

"Initially a lot of our users were focusing on collaboration aspects and focusing on engineering aspects, but [increasingly] we see, if not the majority, they have deployed our solutions broadly [into areas like] portfolio management, compliance management, quality," Gulati said. "[Agile's] synergies with Oracle will take this even further. We are taking Agile PLM to the next level. We have capabilities to build integrations to the broader enterprise architecture to get to the same page to build composite applications. Synergies are driving this effect."

Gulati said there are four dimensions of PLM development at Oracle. Rather than focusing on building a bigger toolbox, Oracle's first priority is building deep-industry best practices. "Trends like how software is becoming [the] core of any device, How do you manage all aspects of that? ...Or with companies like Boeing, How do you deal with all the supply collaboration from supply to design to manufacturing?" he said. "We will factor in trends and continue to innovate."

Oracle will also expand the breadth of enterprise PLM on a number of fronts, focusing on enhancing the usability, upgradability and analytics capabilities of Agile's PLM software. At the same time, Oracle will look to integrate Agile deeper into enterprise processes through its Application Integration Architecture.

"Lots of processes need to go beyond Agile to ERP, SCM, etc. with information integration and process integrations to build composites [and] utilize analytics," Gulati said. "We are doing this based on AIA. Whatever integrations we are building should work with Oracle and others. This year we will focus on manufacturing and master data management, next year on CRM, planning and financials."