Oracle Buys Agile in Bid for PLM Market

On the heels of Siemens closing its acquisition of PLM leader UGS, there was more consolidation in the PLM market space this week as enterprise application giant Oracle Corp. snapped up independent company Agile Software Corp..

In a cash deal in which Oracle will pay $8.10 for each share of Agile, Oracle is doling out $495 million to buy itself a PLM strategy and product line. Although Oracle has had a PLM strategy for some time, it was limited and didn’t hold much traction among companies looking for competitive products, company officials admit.

“We were late to market with our organic PLM product—we had some customers, but we weren’t a market leader,” said Hardeep Gulati, Oracle’s senior director of PLM manufacturing product strategy, in an interview with Design News. “We see PLM as a core part of our enterprise architecture … and Agile is the go-forward, best-in-class PLM solution.”

The Agile product line will replace Oracle’s current PLM lineup, Gulati said, although Oracle will continue to support existing PLM customers. The company will provide a more detailed roadmap for integration and open standards for the PLM suite when the deal closes, some time in July.

Agile already offers integration with Oracle and platforms, and 40% of the Agile customer base has SAP software installed as their core enterprise software platform, Gulati said. The Agile acquisition gives Oracle a leg up over SAP’s PLM suite and the CAD-oriented PLM vendors such as PTC and Dassault Systemes, he noted, because the pair provide more of an enterprise perspective to PLM. “Companies are not just looking at managing their design environment–they want to manage their complete enterprise product information and lifecycle processes, and that’s something the CAD vendors are not in a position to do,” Gulati said.