Integrated SCM/PDM/CRM and delivery of software products to 160.000 customers

The release and deployment of enterprise application software is a potentially complex task for software vendors. This complexity can unfortunately result in a significant amount of work and risk. This paper presents a case study of a product software vendor that tries to reduce this complexity by integrating product data management (PDM), software configuration management (SCM), and customer relationship management (CRM) into one system. The case study shows that by combining these management areas in a single intelligent software knowledge base, software release and deployment processes can be automated and improved, thereby enabling a software vendor of enterprise software to serve a large number of customers with different product configurations