Business development: the Aras approach

Aras Corporation, specialized in commercial open source solutions for enterprise product lifecycle management (PLM), Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP), yesterday announced the availability of the version 8 of the Aras Innovator suite.

Aras, a privately held company with institutional investors like Oak Investment Partners, Greylock Partners, Matrix Partners and the angel group eCoast Angels, hosts its open source projects on Microsoft’s CodePlex collaborative development website.

Bill Hilf, the General Manager of Microsoft’s Platform Strategy, stated:

We are supportive of Aras’ move to offer enterprise open source solutions on the Microsoft stack, and we continue to see tremendous growth in the Microsoft partner ecosystem as a variety of industry partners are finding innovative ways to take advantage of the value of the Microsoft platform under a wide range of licensing models.

So Microsoft likes open source this way, but is the world ready for Microsoft Open Source?