UGS Corp. has begun to integrate its product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services with Microsoft Corp.'s mid-market business application management platforms to provide a single source for product and financial data to the manufacturers.
The first integrated offering of UGS' Teamcenter and Microsoft Business Solutions' Great Plains, a mid-market, cross-industry financial management product, will be available later this year. Integration with Microsoft's Axapta software suite will be available in early 2006, the companies said.
The integration with Microsoft's mid-market enterprise resource planning (ERP) products is an expansion of a long-standing co-development and marketing partnership, noted Bill Boswell, senior director, Teamcenter product marketing at UGS. "We have worked with [Microsoft] for years on the collaboration platform and on platforms, shared services, SQL server development and much more," Boswell said, in an interview. "What we are talking about now is expanding the relationship and for the first time in the PLM market ... to integrate ERP and PLM."
Expansion of the current relationship is based on increasing customer demand that ERP and PLM work together to improve customers' abilities to access a complete set of information -- from bill of materials to financial data. The new offering will unite data from engineering with corporate ERP processes to streamline the flow of projects from engineering through to manufacturing.
The integration of Teamcenter and Great Plains "provides a common view as to how a company can operate its business," Boswell said. "Customers use PLM for a single view of product and process knowledge. ERP is complementary to that on the financial side. It is vital to have a single view for a portfolio of product information and to be able to view that in the same environment" as other data in the enterprise. "PLM and ERP are very complementary and provide an integrated product development and financial management view for small and mid-size businesses."
UGS currently estimates that 40% of its $1 billion annual business comes from companies with revenues under $750 million, the coveted small and mid-size business (SMB) space. Microsoft, like many ERP providers, have had difficulty penetrating the SMB market.
UGS' Boswell could not estimate the number of customers that use both Microsoft and UGS products -- the first group that will likely benefit from the integrated PLM/ERP product.
Although Microsoft has a November 2004 partnership with Dassault Systemes, a major rival of UGS and close partner with IBM, that alliance focuses on research and development of Dassault's software on Microsoft's product stack and does not include integration of the ERP and PLM platforms. In 2003, Microsoft Business Solutions extended its partnership with Autodesk to build a PLM product for SMB manufacturing customers that integrates Autodesk's design data with Microsoft's ERP packages. PTC, another PLM provider, does not partner with Microsoft.
The magnetic attraction between PLM and ERP also extends beyond packaged software. Two players in the emerging software as a service space, PLM purveyor Arena Solutions and ERP developer Intacct, recently disclosed plans to tightly integrate their hosted application services.
For UGS, the partnership also opens up new sales channels through Microsoft's reseller network. "This integration will create new business opportunities for partners of both companies," said Kerry Grimes, UGS' vice president, mid market and global channel sales, in a statement. "This will enhance UGS' global partner network and it will offer Microsoft Great Plains and Microsoft Axapta implementation partners an opportunity to grow their business and be more competitive in selling their existing Microsoft business solutions."