January marked a turning point for on-demand product data management provider Arena Solutions. Michael Topolovac, who had held the chief executive position since co-founding the company in 2000, relinquished his title and assumed a position on the company's board. In his place, Arena appointed Craig Livingston, the former vice president and general manager of Agile's SME division.
Since then, speculators have wondered whether the selection of Livingston, a veteran of Oracle's 2007 acquisition of Agile, means that Arena itself will soon be sold.
"I think Arena is going to be sold," Livingston says, before quickly qualifying the statement. "It's going to be sold to the public through an IPO or sold much, much later, down the road, when the value and the size are much higher."
According to the new CEO, a much simpler business rationale governed the transition at the top. He calls Topolovac a "really brilliant idea guy" who can hatch a new technology concept and base a business on it. But 18 months ago, Topolovac realized that Arena needed someone who could scale the business.
Toward the end of 2007, a confluence of circumstances led Arena to Livingston. Oracle's acquisition of Agile and its subsequent de-emphasis of mid-market PLM — the bread and butter of Livingston's Agile Advantage division — gave him the motivation to try something new.
Now, looking back to Arena's early years, Livingston remembers thinking of the company from his position at Agile as "kind of amusing. They were interesting, and we were running into them [in deals], but, frankly, the product hadn't reached the maturity that I believed it needed ..."
The intervening years saw strong product development at Arena — helped, in part, by its oft-updated on-demand software, Livingston says. By the time Oracle swooped in on Agile, "we were, I guess you would say, avid competitors," he says with a chuckle.
Now the mid-market PLM arena is Arena's to win, he says. Jim Brown, an analyst at Aberdeen Group, concurs, but says it won't be easy. "One of the things you have to consider is that larger players haven't given up on the mid-market," Brown says. Dassault Systemes, PTC, and Siemens PLM Software all maintain offerings for smaller companies, he notes, and Oracle may still win its share of business with its Agile technology.
At the top of Livingston's priority list for 2008 is leveraging Arena's recent success — the company surpassed 300 active customers not long ago — to build the client base and take advantage of whatever new opportunities may arise in the wake of the Oracle-Agile pairing.
In the product realm, he sees room for improvement in Arena's ability to integrate with its clients' other applications. "You can't just have something that goes in easy and is inexpensive and solves a problem; it also has to do that in the context of all the other processes and applications."
This article originally appeared in the March 2008 issue of Managing Automation.