Arena to go live with the Arena Spring '10 update release on Sunday

FOSTER CITY, CA - Arena Solutions today announced it will go live with the Arena Spring '10 update release on Sunday, April 11, 2010. With a multitude of usability enhancements, Spring '10 is the latest in a string of recent releases that make Arena even easier to use and help expert and novice users alike be both more efficient and more productive.

The Spring '10 update release is largely focused on the user interface, updating the application's look and improving users' ability to quickly locate -- and easily work with -- information on the most commonly used pages. The release also improves the collaborative capabilities of Arena for the rapidly growing number of customers who share bills of materials (BOMs) with contract manufacturers (CMs) in Chinese-speaking countries. Comprehensive application help is now available in simplified Chinese to help these CMs (and all Chinese-speaking Arena users) get up and running more quickly and reduce the kinds of communication errors that lead to costly manufacturing mistakes.

"Companies switch to Arena from Excel," said Marc Escobosa, vice president of product design at Arena Solutions. "As a tool for managing product data, controlling engineering changes and sharing BOMs with CMs and suppliers, Arena is clearly miles ahead of Excel in terms of functionality. But we know that's not enough. People have to be comfortable with the tool too, and that's why we're constantly working to improve the usability of the application. I'm pleased that we've been able to focus on the user experience and make a number of the updates that customers have requested -- and that I personally have long wanted to see as well. The learning curve for Arena has always been quick, but these latest improvements make the application feel more familiar from the start. With this release building on recent improvements that get data loaded rapidly and users trained quickly, it's never been easier for companies to make the move to Arena."

Arena users who wish to see a preview of the new interface and other Spring '10 enhancements can do so by logging into the Arena Discussion Forums
and visiting the Spring '10 Preview forum.