Apriso, a leading provider of adaptive software solutions for global Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM), today announced support of virtualization for its FlexNet application suite, helping manufacturers to reduce their total cost of IT ownership, improve systems availability and accelerate regulatory compliance initiatives.

Faced with increasingly distributed manufacturing operations and resulting IT infrastructures, manufacturers now seek strategies to standardize, simplify and automate the implementation and maintenance of their plant IT systems. Virtualization has been embraced as a way to improve hardware utilization and simplify IT support by running multiple applications on a single, shared server. Manufacturers can now consider this option when installing their FlexNet^® solution with VMware virtualization technology for development, test and production environments.

“FlexNet customers can now achieve a faster Mean-Time-To-Recovery (MTTR) for a lower total cost,” said Chris Will, CTO at Apriso. “If a production server should fail, a VM instance can be provisioned rapidly to spare servers hosting other applications, eliminating the need for expensive 'cold standby’ or underutilized servers.”

Apriso customers are large global manufactures with a collection of plants ranging in sizes. FlexNet’s ability to support virtual environments contributes to cost and time savings for large roll outs that include smaller, lower volume plants. Due to the heavy intensity of managing and executing operations within a large, highly complex manufacturing facility, it may not make sense to consider virtualization within a heavy traffic and data throughput production environment. Smaller facilities, however, may be a perfect fit to unlock potential cost savings and reduced complexity.

“It is not a surprise that Apriso is the first manufacturing operations management provider to publically support virtualization. Enterprise manufacturing operations demand that solutions support the largest and the smallest operations. Traditional MES systems have focused on the largest, most complex plants and have had great difficulty scaling down to support less complex operations. Apriso continues to serve the whole manufacturing network,” commented John Fishell, director of product management at Apriso.

One of Apriso’s Consumer Goods manufacturers has already cut the cost of implementation, support and maintenance by installing FlexNet in a virtual environment at several locations, helping to accelerate their multi-site deployment. Standardized virtual server profiles can be established once and then be easily replicated across the enterprise. Another manufacturing customer in the Life Sciences industry stands to benefit from their virtual FlexNet deployment through reduced validation requirements, as part of their achieving regulatory compliance.