Nearly eight months after announcing plans to acquire product lifecycle management (PLM) software leader Agile Corp. for $495 million, Oracle Corp. today said it will this year begin to execute on a strategy that will broaden both the integration of Agile's PLM products with Oracle's enterprise systems and the functional definition of PLM.
Oracle also committed to long-term support for the Agile applications under its Applications Unlimited program.
Oracle, in a briefing today with Managing Automation, said its first order of business will be to build new, process-based integrations between Agile and Oracle's ERP, manufacturing, and product master data management applications this year. A second wave of integrations will marry Agile with Oracle's Siebel CRM, demand planning, and quality and financial management systems, said Hardeep Gulati, vice president for PLM and product information management product strategy.
The integrations, Gulati said, will be based on Oracle's Application Integration Architecture and will involve the creation of core object definitions that can be shared by different applications as well as shared processes defined as Web services.
This integration will allow Oracle to satisfy customer demands for a much broader PLM functionality, he said. By integrating Agile PLM with Siebel CRM, for example, manufacturers would be able to perform more comprehensive product portfolio planning by factoring customer requirements into their plans, Gulati said. And, by integrating Agile PLM with the quality and financial systems in Oracle's ERP products, for example, manufacturers could understand how products are performing in the field and more quickly integrate that information into product design processes.
"We see a trend where companies are looking at PLM much more broadly," Gulati said. "What's driving that is that companies aren't just relying on manufacturing now; they're focusing more on building the brand and providing customer service, on managing overall customer expectations and requirements."
The need to collaborate more with contract manufacturers and to document compliance with more regulations also is forcing more integration between PLM and other enterprise applications, he told Managing Automation.
And Oracle's process integrations won't be limited to its own applications. The company also plans certified integrations between Agile and SAP enterprise applications, Gulati said. Oracle is actively selling Agile applications into SAP and other non-Oracle accounts, he said, in much the same way that it sells its Siebel and GLog logistics application into non-Oracle accounts.
In addition to providing broader, process-focused integrations, Oracle has several other plans for Agile PLM. The product's inclusion under Applications Unlimited means that Oracle will provide lifetime support for deployed Agile applications and will continue to roll out new releases of the software, Gulati said. Oracle plans an enhancement to the Agile 9.2 release within the current calendar year.
Oracle also plans to improve Agile PLM's usability with Web 2.0 technologies and techniques that will enable more social networking and collaboration. And, Gulati said, the company plans to extend its Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle Data Exchange ETL platforms to the Agile environment.
Oracle's acquisition of Agile and its plans to support and extend the product, Gulati said, have encouraged some manufacturers to expand their use of the software or to buy Agile applications for the first time.
"We've seen a huge amount of progress and momentum since we completed the acquisition in July," he said.
Oracle declined to say how much the Agile customer base has grown from the 1,250 reported at the time of the acquisition. Gulati, however, said several new deals have been signed. Bayer's consumer division and Freescale Semiconductor, for example, have become Agile customers since the acquisition, he said. Both are SAP ERP customers.
"The acquisition validated the software and reinforced the viability of the software," Gulati said. "Customers know it's going to be around."