IBM announced plans to create a Product Development Integration Framework to better link the design and development of products with core business processes, elevating product lifecycle management and development from an engineering-centric function to a strategic business process that improves executive decision-making abilities across the enterprise.

IBM is leveraging its industry lead in service oriented architecture and its 25-year experience delivering PLM Solutions to tackle the tough customer problems of integration.

IBM has secured support for its new framework from eight leading PLM and integration solution providers who have signed on to build solutions around this new, open standards-based platform that emphasizes the interoperability of applications from vendors across the product development domain. The new, open framework, combined with business partner PLM applications, will allow clients to easily extend design and business collaboration throughout their value chain.

"The area of product development, with its broad cross-enterprise reach and critical impact on the success and profitability of the enterprise, requires a degree of flexibility that can only be achieved through a service oriented approach," said Robert LeBlanc, general manager, IBM WebSphere Software. "IBM is committed to helping our clients advance their product development processes in the most effective manner possible, and the PDIF will play a critical role in achieving that goal."

The eight application providers supporting the new IBM framework are Agile Software Corp., Centric Software Inc., Engineous Software Inc., Geometric Software Solutions Co. Ltd., MSC Software Corporation, PROSTEP AG, PTC and UGS Corp. Other vendors are being encouraged to evaluate the technical criteria required to enable their applications to support the framework. 

In October, IBM introduced its largest-ever lineup of new software and services for building and expanding a service oriented architecture, including a new SOA technology platform enabled by IBM's WebSphere Business Services Fabric. The IBM product development framework is an extension of this platform, adding Business Partner applications, business services and other SOA assets dedicated to product development and related business processes. It takes advantage of SOA to help integrate multiple enterprise systems and applications, enabling flexible business processes built on reusable services without relying on rigid, hard-coded connections.