While product lifecycle management (PLM) is associated with high-cost, SAP-like offerings from the likes of PTC, Dassault, or Siemens/UGS, challenger Aras embarked on an open source path about a year and a half ago. And in the first full year that it went open source, its paid business nearly tripled.

This week, Aras is announcing the first in a series of international language support with full Unicode character and script sets. The first languages to get supported will include simple and Mandarin Chinese, with German, Russian, and French currently in progress. It’s part of Version 9, which also has been certified for Microsoft platforms, including SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008.

The product is also known for its use of a SOA architecture, exposing its functions as WSDL and SOAP-based web services. While that sounds more like an integration toolkit than an application, Aras also offers Prebuilt templates or workflows for new product programs management, engineering bill of materials (BOM), and approved vendor/contract manufacturer lists.

The draw for such a product, which may not have the fullness (or complexity) of incumbent offerings, is that the open source invites customers to mold the product to their needs, while the SOA architecture provides a standards-based architecture for piecing together processes. Currently, the company has over 50 paying subscribers and at least 10,000 registered downloads. Aras also claims to be the only PLM provider that is certified for Microsoft, rather than UNIX platforms.

---