Autodesk to Bring Microsoft Business Solutions Closer to PLM
P.J. Jakovljevic & Jim Brown - November 17, 2003

Event Summary

At the beginning of October, amid several announcements of strategic extensions for its few enterprise resource planning (ERP) product lines, possibly the most eye-catching was Microsoft Corporation's (NASDAQ: MSFT) initiative to avail most of its Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) ERP offerings with long needed pieces of product lifecycle management (PLM) functionality. That will happen through extension of the existing relationship with Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADSK), a leading design software and digital content company, to build a PLM solution for the thousands of MBS and Autodesk customers in the mainstream small and mid-market segment manufacturing industry. MBS and Autodesk's Manufacturing Solutions Division will collaborate to deliver a solution that lets customers integrate designs from Autodesk's pervasive CAD software with Microsoft's ERP solutions through the Autodesk Vault design data/engineering data management (EDM) software, giving these companies a way to easily connect the engineering teams that design products with the operations teams that manufacture them...