Siemens moves into application lifecycle management with Polarion acquisition

The browser-based technology enhances will enhance Teamcenter as a PLM solution for system-driven product development.

Siemens has acquired Polarion, developer of a browser-based application lifecycle management (ALM) enterprise solution. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed; the deal should close in the first quarter of 2016.

Because PLM screenshots are usually pretty boring, we offer this robotic arm from the Polarion home page, highlighting key reasons for using application lifecycle management for developing smart products. (Source: Polarion)

Application lifecycle management is the integration of software development into product lifecycle management (PLM). In an age when an automobile has 1 million lines of software code under the hood, manufacturers with even a sliver of silicon in their products need better ways to manage all elements of development, from integration to verification and validation.

Siemens says Polarion is the first to bring a browser-based approach to ALM. In announcing the acquisition, Siemens praised Polarion software as being “a leader in the ALM market, leveraging an open architecture, exhibiting state-of-art source code management and supporting the needs of open source development.”

Siemens says it will add Polarion technology to Teamcenter, its market-leading PLM platform. The two companies have worked together for two years, and had a joint marketing strategy in place before the acquisition was announced. Siemens says Polarion currently has more than 2.5 million users, which must be counting seats and not companies where it is in use.

What do we think?

At the start of 2015 it seemed the Big Three in PLM (Dassault Systemes, PTC, Siemens) had staked out separate identities for the years ahead. Dassault was moving to bring its 3D PLM technology into new parts of the enterprise, including finance, brand management, and retail. PTC was betting the farm on the Internet of Things, and Siemens was content to be the top dog in traditional PLM for product development. But now it seems no matter what path a PLM company takes to the future, the roads all cross at what we sometimes call mechatronics, the union of the digital and the mechanical. Differentiation between the three in this area will no doubt be an important tasks for their marketing teams in 2016.