We had the chance to attend the Aras Community Event, ACE 2025, to hear strategy and progress updates from Aras Corporation, their customers, and their partners. It was exciting because it was the 25th Anniversary of ACE and the first time in memory that we’ve seen a keynote speech from a balcony ballroom seat! It was a unique venue for a unique company in the PLM space.
Our key takeaways are that Aras is successfully delivering across the elements of what makes them unique, what’s known as “The Aras Effect.” Beyond those core fundamentals, Aras showcased strong customer success stories and progress on delivering new AI capabilities that will become increasingly important to both customers and the market in the future.
The Aras Effect – What Makes Aras Unique
We’ve always seen Aras as a disruptor in the PLM space and believe that manufacturers looking for PLM – or to augment their current PLM solution – should understand what makes them different. This difference got a name and a more formal definition last year, “the Aras Effect,” what I previously called the “Aras difference” in a 2023 post.
But it’s more than a name on a marketing slide, it’s a way to better encapsulate the unique value proposition that Aras brings to the market and their customers. We won’t share it all here, but there are two things that are important to understand:
- Why it matters: Quoting from last year’s ACE writeup, companies looking for a PLM system “should include Aras in their research, not because they are necessarily a better offering but because they are a very different offering. They aren’t the right fit for every organization, but their approach is compelling and high value for the right companies.”
- Aras is delivering on the promise: Aras is walking the talk with this strategy and delivering against its tenants. We’ll discuss each of those in this post.
What we saw at ACE this year was Aras staying the course on these core differentiators and making progress to deliver them more fully to their customers. We’ll share a couple of specific examples, specifically the new product Aras InnovatorEdge and the continued growth in the Build with Aras.
InnovatorEdge Expands Connectivity
One of the biggest value drivers of any PLM system is creating a cohesive, integrated digital thread of product data. That data extends beyond engineering, spanning the enterprise and the supply chain. Manufacturers have stopped looking for a magic PLM system that contains all possible digital thread data. Instead, the industry has matured to recognize that digital thread data will reside across multiple enterprise systems. InnovatorEdge is designed to address that reality.
We like how Aras CTO Rob McAveney introduced InnovatorEdge by asking how customers can extend the reach of their digital thread beyond the walls of their company into the supply chain / value chain, into more phases of product lifecycle, and to more disciplines. This closely reflects the value we see Top Performing manufacturers seek in what we call the Four Dimensions of PLM Expansion. We also recognize the need for integration to support this. In fact, our recent renditions of the framework include an integration layer around the edge.
Rob explains that to accomplish this, you need the Aras Effect. And in particular, you need the new Aras InnovatorEdge low-code API management framework.
Aras InnovatorEdge is intended to help manufacturers develop connected intelligence and has four primary elements:
- Connections: Increasing the ability to integrate Aras Innovator with the ecosystem of other systems that support the digital thread via low-code API web services
- AI & Analytics: More on that later
- Portals: Expanding the ability to connect digital thread data to partners. This started with the Supplier Portal introduced last year and has now been expanded to support other entities that contribute and consume digital thread data
- Apps: Providing tools to help customers develop purpose-built, low-code apps that leverage Aras Innovator data and capabilities, including (as we understand) composite applications that allow apps to connect with 3rd party solutions
This is just a short introduction to InnovatorEdge. The offering creates a home for some existing capabilities and incorporates new features. Together, it creates a framework for Aras to continue to deliver additional capabilities to meet customer needs beyond what’s included in Aras Innovator.
Build with Aras Continues to Prove the Value of Adaptability
Aras also shared updates that show they are progressing their ability to enable customers to be agile. Agility is arguably more important to manufacturers today than it has been in years. Further, no one company’s PLM needs are exactly the same and creating a competitive advantage often means doing something differently than others do it. At the same time, it’s best to start with best practices.
One of the most unique aspects of Aras Innovator is that it was built with customization in mind. In recent years, we’ve seen Aras double down on this differentiator while also making it easier for their customers to customize their PLM solution and maintain it over time. In addition, they’ve invested in their marketplace to help customers and partners deliver custom-built capabilities to others. “Build with Aras” encapsulates this.
Aras customers shared some significant successes in this area. One of the areas that’s been personally interesting to us is the ability for customers with formula-based products to customize Innovator to meet their needs. Aras now supports food and beverage companies, including Red Bull and some breweries. Aras’ core capabilities can also be expanded by a solution in their marketplace, Fulvisol Food & Beverage, designed to meet the unique PLM needs of the food and beverage industry. This has been traditionally difficult for PLM companies built for bill-of-material oriented, discrete manufacturing environments. We’re keeping a close eye on this space
We’ve seen Aras make interesting advances in this area. For example, they continue to enhance their low-code capabilities and their low-code CAD connectors. One of the interesting advances also relates to Aras’ move to a SaaS offering. Aras has invested heavily in a DevOps environment for themselves and their customers to develop, deploy, and maintain their custom and marketplace applications. They introduced a low-code DevOps that will be coming soon in a beta that is designed to make it easier for non-developers who don’t know Git and related processes to manage the process.
Powered By Continues to Prove the Value of Community
One of the very unique ways that Innovator’s “Build With” adaptability comes to market is through their “Powered By” strategy. Aras has made their Innovator platform available for partners to use as the basis for their own solutions. Examples of commercial offerings built on top of Aras Innovator include:
- Ansys Minerva: a simulation process and data management (SPDM) solution
- AVEVA ALM: asset lifecycle management (ALM) solutions
- SAIC ReadyOne: digital engineering solution meeting DoD requirements
Beyond these, Aras and Sandvik jointly announced a new partnership to use Aras Innovator as the foundation for MasterCAM CAM data management and to further connect the product digital thread. In a similar way, Steepgraph is offering Scale B, a solution leveraging Aras Innovator designed for small to medium sized manufacturers. Each of these solutions fills an important niche in the industry and leverages rich capabilities already built into Innovator.
New Focus on AI
No software conference is complete without an update on what the vendor is doing about AI. As experienced analysts, we could be jaded about that. After all, AI is not brand new and we’ve been using it in engineering and manufacturing for decades. However, we do believe there is a fundamental shift that software vendors must explore for their customers. Our recent research shows three important things:
- Manufacturers are planning to invest in AI
- They are gaining rapid business value from adopting AI
- They would prefer to get AI solutions from their current software vendors
Given that, our viewpoint is similar to the stance we took on the cloud transition. Even if a customer wasn’t interested in transitioning to the cloud, we believed it was important for their vendor to have a cloud strategy to remain viable in the future. Today, if a vendor doesn’t have an AI strategy and isn’t making progress, their customers should be concerned. From what we can tell, Aras customers should be satisfied with what they see.
The theme of ACE 2025, Connected Intelligence, focused on the AI imperative. Aras CEO Roque Martin kicked off the conversation about AI early. There was also a fascinating panel discussing the topic. Rob McAveney shared more details about the strategy breaking it into three phases:
- Discover: helping customers learn more from their data, mentioning examples including ECO phase in, component supply, and root cause analysis
- Enrich: more advanced capabilities providing entity recognition, contextual reasoning, topic modeling, and learning, mentioning examples including identifying and correcting missing or incorrect links in a digital thread and linking factory floor data to quality planning parameters
- Amplify: expanding to capabilities like agentic AI and generative learning, mentioning examples including using AI to build common variability model (breakdown structure) from past engineering work or conduct ECO impact analysis
Tangible examples of Aras’ investment are the new Aras AI Assistant, a chatbot currently in beta, created to help users access information in Aras Innovator. This capability will extend to custom capabilities and integrations in the future to support Build By. They also announced Aras AI-assisted Search, available later this year, that provides rich information including 3D data, images, and voice search results filtered on their semantic meaning. Aras is also working on CoPilot and AgenticAI technology, and we expect to see announcements from them in these areas soon.
Microsoft as Partner and Customer
While we’re speaking about AI, it’s a good time to mention the unique relationship Aras has with Microsoft. On one hand, Aras is a partner that strongly leverages Microsoft technologies. This has significant implications for Aras in AI because of Microsoft’s investments in Microsoft Azure AI tools. In addition, Microsoft is a customer that uses Aras Innovator to help them develop and manage their hardware products, including Surface, Xbox, and quantum products. They also use it for Azure servers and racks. They’re a significant customer, with over 800 users per day on average, including many outside of engineering, including sourcing, legal, and product management.
With that said, Microsoft’s presentation on what they’ve done for themselves with AI on top or Aras Innovator is one of the most compelling examples we’ve seen of a manufacturer using AI to extend the value of PLM. The Microsoft team shared three compelling examples:
- Someone from Legal looking for information on packaging compliance for a part
- An engineer considering sustainability for carbon and recycled material, but needing to do tradeoff analysis with cost, supply chain, etc.
- Reducing the time it takes to execute an ECO by handling repetitive tasks like looking for components that are end of life (EOL)
These are all practical examples where Microsoft used AI, which they view as “just a tool,” for practical purposes and meaningfully improved efficiency.
Other Notes
There is too much to include from the conference, but some other takeaways we want to mention include:
- CERN’s David Widegren explained how they use Aras Innovator to develop and manage the “world’s most complex machine,” the Large Hadron Collider, including their creation of a digital twin that provides 3D navigation based on data in Aras combined with other data. It’s an impressive implementation.
- Honda’s Tomoya Isome and Nobuyuki Akahoshi shared information about their Aras Innovator implementation that they have scaled to “tens of thousands of users.”
- Aras’ SVP Igal Kaptsan reviewed recent user-led enhancements to Innovator including user interface updates in beta, unified change management, requirements management, and updates to the Office productivity connector among others. Aras has been investing in maturing the product overall.
Our Take
Aras Innovator is a very different style of solution than most enterprise systems, and any other PLM system, due to its adaptability. While that’s not the right solution for every business, the Aras Effect offers an alternative that some manufacturers find compelling. Aras is doubling down on their differentiators, maturing the existing solution, helping further connect digital threads across the value chain with InnovatorEdge, and investing in new areas like requirements management and AI. The conference showed continued progress against the Aras strategy.
Thank You
Thank you Roque Martin, Rob McAveney, and Igal Kaptsan for the business and product updates and to Josh Epstein , Bruce Bookbinder , Jason Kasper , Kylie Ochab, and others for informal conversations and help along the way.