Oracle announced that since acquiring Agile Software Corporation in July 2007, the company has been positioned as a PLM leader by industry research firm Gartner, as well as ahead of its competitors, by AMR Research, solidifying its leadership position among Enterprise Product Lifecycle Management vendors. With Oracle's Agile Product Lifecycle Management, Oracle is capitalizing on opportunities to provide Enterprise PLM solutions to new organizations around the world, and has experienced significant customer momentum across multiple industries including consumer goods, life sciences, high-tech and industrial manufacturing.

PLM continues to evolve from an engineering-centric tool used to manage complex product design information to an enterprise-wide business application for managing product information, streamlining business processes and enabling better decisions across the complete product lifecycle. Research published by AMR Research in December 2007 entitled "PLM Market Landscape: Evolving To Enable Value Chain Excellence" found that end users are "increasingly looking at PLM as a standard enterprise platform" and asking how PLM systems "can be used to manage their product portfolios, capture customer needs and integrate non-engineering staff into the product design process, a domain historically dominated by engineers."

Independent Research Firms Validate Strengths of Oracle's Agile PLM
Leading research firms have recognized Oracle's Agile PLM for its market positioning, functionality and customer success. The recently published PLM vendor analysis by AMR Research examined market trends and offerings from various PLM vendors. This report included a PLM vendor landscape comparison that rated 11 PLM vendors' focus across six key areas of functionality. Compared to the other vendors, Oracle's Agile PLM was found to offer a high-level of focus in the most categories, and was the only vendor to rank medium-high to high across all areas. Additionally, AMR Research cited strengths of Oracle's Agile PLM to include "industry-specific workflows and templates for FDA-regulated industries, like food and beverage and pharmaceuticals, and strong sourcing capability, which has gained traction particularly in high-tech electronics."