Manufacturing operations management software supplier Apriso Corp. last week said it has entered into a partnership under which it will collaborate with systems integrator EDS to extend, sell, and implement Apriso’s FlexNet product.

Under the agreement, Apriso will provide the FlexNet platform, and EDS, a unit of Hewlett-Packard Co., will provide related implementation and business process management services. The two companies will target six vertical industries, said Apriso President and CEO Jim Henderson in an interview with Managing Automation: automotive, industrial products, aerospace & defense, rolled products (paper, metals, etc.), consumer goods, and life sciences.

The agreement signals an increased interest among large systems integrators like EDS in participating more directly in the market for MOM and MES software, according to Henderson. Until fairly recently, he said, most large integrators believed individual MOM and MES products targeted only narrow vertical industries.

“The big SIs had trouble wrapping their business around that,” he said.

More recently, vendors such as Apriso have begun targeting large, global manufacturing enterprises with horizontal software products that can be tailored for specific vertical industries.

“Now the SIs are saying, ‘We can really put resources into that. There’s enough there, and delivery is on a global basis,’” Henderson said.

Apriso also has partnership agreements with systems integrators Accenture and Atos Origin SA.

Besides collaborating on sales, marketing, and product deployment, Apriso and EDS will work to develop extensions to the FlexNet platform to address what the two companies see as the needs of the manufacturing community, Henderson said. Apriso expects the alliance to generate three or four extensions to FlexNet over the next year. Henderson declined to describe the extensions, but said some will target vertical industry requirements.

The new agreement formalizes a cooperative relationship between Apriso and EDS that began two years ago, according to Henderson. Since then, the companies have worked together to pursue a handful of customer opportunities. They have collaborated on a handful of deployments to date and have “several” in the pipeline, Henderson said.

The agreement means EDS will dedicate more resources to the Apriso partnership, according to Henderson.