On January 14, 2020, Aras announced a strategic partnership with ANSYS (NASDAQ: ANSS) that includes ANSYS licensing Aras’ platform technology. The press release states “ANSYS is leveraging Aras’ resilient platform services combined with its proven simulation domain expertise and technology for new product offerings to improve productivity and maximize business value from simulation investments. ANSYS will deliver commercial offerings for simulation process and data management, process integration, design optimization and simulation-driven data science.”
Digital Transformation Support
Aras’ open ecosystem strategy helps partners leverage and even incorporate Aras technology in their own solutions. This approach enables customers to adopt a platform approach within their digital transformation initiatives which gives them confidence that they will be able to adapt their product lifecycle solutions to future challenges. The beauty of this strategy is that partners, ISVs, and customers can leverage the services to integrate and extend their solutions and the Aras platform. CIMdata is looking forward to seeing how Aras and ANSYS customers improve their digital threads by leveraging the combined capabilities.
For years CIMdata has noted the complexity of today’s advanced multi-physics simulation and analysis activities and the lack of success in getting simulation data and processes connected to the rest of the product design and development lifecycle. The acquisition of Comet in September 2019 showed Aras was serious about extending their lifecycle support into the simulation arena, and this partnership with ANSYS provides further validation of the Aras strategy and platform capability.
Impacts
This is not Aras’ first OEM license agreement, their most notable agreement to date is with Infor who uses the Aras platform for their PLM Accelerate product.1 A key element of the Aras strategy is openness, and they are known for the Enterprise Open Source distribution of their product. The OEM licensing of their solutions to other ISVs gives another proof point to that openness commitment while driving revenue from new areas of enterprises and new customers.
This is also a validation of Aras technology as ANSYS, a global leader in the simulation and analysis market decided to partner rather than build from scratch their next generation simulation data and process management technology. While many see data and process management as a commodity, doing it well at scale is still a non-trivial problem. Both ANSYS and Infor have built solutions in the past but have chosen the Aras platform as the foundation for their go forward solutions. Aras tells CIMdata there are other OEM deals in the works, so we are looking forward to future announcements.