Meridian Systems Announces New Prolog Developer Network Program

Meridian Systems, the Plan-Build-Operate technology solutions leader for project-based organizations, announced today the Prolog Developer Network (PDN), a developer-oriented program that is now available to Meridian customers and technology partners who intend to extend Prolog® software solutions on their own. PDN subscribers can access shared knowledge, tools and technical resources to effectively build Prolog integrations, and quickly leverage the power of Prolog Connect, a new Web Services development platform for Prolog software.

“Meridian’s market leadership in construction project management software continues to drive innovative programs, such as PDN,” said Sallie Sutter, vice president, client services, Meridian Systems. “PDN uniquely supports its members with easy access to a variety of expert resources, allowing customers and partners to reduce costs and save time when extending Prolog to other business systems and applications.” visit the Meridian PDN portal for complete details

3SL® Inc. Releases Cradle®-6.0 Requirements Management and Systems Engineering Software

3SL®, a developer of innovative systems engineering products, today announced the release of Cradle-6.0. Cradle-6.0 is unique. It provides a complete end-to-end solution for requirements management, model-based systems engineering, risk management and verification and validation (V&V) across the entire systems development lifecycle in a single product with a single User Interface. Cradle ensures end-user requirements are met by tying them to the methods and implementation details throughout development. As changes are made, the application provides traceability to understand and record the effect of a change in requirements or technical functionality to the rest of the program. Cradle-6.0 dramatically simplifies the processes of modeling a project and showing the links between end-user requirements and the plans on how to implement them. The streamlined workflow makes Cradle even easier to use while reducing the time it takes to get new users up to speed and effective.

“Customers using the Beta version have been amazed at the new benefits and improvements in usability,” said Mark Walker, President of 3SL. “Making tools more intuitive and streamlining the steps for modeling projects leads to projects that are accurate, complete, on time and within budget.” See the 3SL web site for complete details

Oracle Unveils New Release of Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management

Latest Enterprise PLM Offering Helps Mitigate Risk, Reduce Costs and Increase User Productivity

Oracle today unveiled Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) 9.3, a new enterprise PLM offering with advanced risk analysis, an enterprise PLM backbone that integrates other applications and hundreds of productivity-enhancing innovations. This latest release equips customers to drive profitable innovations, mitigate risk, lower development and product costs and improve productivity across the entire product lifecycle. Agile PLM 9.3 represents the latest milestone for Oracle’s “Applications Unlimited” program. See the Oracle press release for complete details

Oracle Buys Intellectual Property Assets of Conformia

Oracle announced that it has acquired the intellectual property assets of Conformia Software.
Conformia’s Product and Process Lifecycle Management (PPLM) software has unique capabilities for Life Sciences companies to manage drug design, development and transfer to production across Bio, Pharmaceutical and Chemical drug components. Oracle plans to integrate Conformia’s product and technology into Oracle Agile PLM solution to offer an end-to-end solution for managing drug development, packaging and commercialization. Oracle plans to provide integrations to Oracle applications, Oracle Health Sciences applications and 3rd party systems. This combination will enable Pharmaceutical and Bio-technology companies to accelerate innovation, meet regulatory objectives and improve productivity. See Oracle's press release for complete details of this transaction

Developing and Launching "Whole Product Offerings"

Whole Product Offerings (aka "WPOs") are central to the success of any new product development and launch. Development, product management and marketing teams now face the mandate from senior management - and customers - to deliver Whole Product Offerings globally.

Gone are the high tech glory days of designing and launching a complex feature-rich "box" which sits in the data center, wiring closet or service provider node. Customers - enterprise and consumers alike - have long since demanded total solutions, which most commonly include:

Hardware
Operating Systems
Applications
Services
Support

... and full interoperability with solutions from other vendors.

What is the take away for product management and product marketing teams involved in preparing business cases, comparative ROI assessments and manging product/solution roadmaps for management? Answer - not only start with the customer, however, take a holistic view from day one to understand the customers' complete business need. It is no longer good enough to understand your customer's need, rather to understand your customer's customer as well. See article from FreePatentsOnline provides a good starting point for defining a WPO