Agile's PLM solutions help engineers, manufacturing and supply chain professionals and business executives drive the product innovation and introduction process, share product specifications and configurations and collaborate effectively across the supply chain in a variety of industries, including high-tech, life sciences, industrial manufacturing and consumer packaged goods. Agile's solutions help customers make better product portfolio decisions, accelerate new product introduction, improve manufacturing quality and manage regulatory compliance. Customers of Agile include Acer, Flextronics International, GE Medical Systems, Harris, Heinz, Johnson & Johnson, Lockheed Martin, McDonald's, Micron, QUALCOMM, Shell and ZF.

PLM is evolving into an enterprise-wide discipline that spans multiple product design systems and interacts with a wide-range of enterprise applications to manage the complete product lifecycle from concept and design, to production, sales and service. The combination of Agile and Oracle will create an integrated, enterprise-wide PLM solution. Additionally, Oracle's commitment to open-standards based integration will enable users of other enterprise applications to utilize Agile's best-in-class capabilities.

"Profitable product innovation is critical to product-based industries, making PLM one of the fastest growing application segments," said Oracle President Charles Phillips. "The addition of Agile, which will serve as the foundation of our PLM offering, will further Oracle's strategy of delivering industry-specific enterprise applications and allows us to offer yet another strategic application to SAP customers."

"With over 1,250 PLM customers and over 10,000 visualization customers globally, Agile has a proven track record of rapid, successful implementations integrated to a wide range of ERP and CAD systems," said Agile CEO Jay Fulcher. "By becoming part of Oracle we can bring Agile's solutions to a wider audience and accelerate the advance of Enterprise PLM."

The merger is subject to stockholder and regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions and is expected to close in mid to late July 2007.