Industry analysts estimate that up to 80% of R&D budgets are allocated to maintaining legacy products. But, older products are vulnerable to competitive pressures, yielding decreased revenue and margins. Moreover, a lopsided resource allocation to older products significantly limits a company’s ability to work on the next generation of products that could leverage high-growth market opportunities.

With a shrinking product investment window, a firm’s investment in its client base declines and eventually, enterprise clients migrate away due to poor support strategies around non-core products.

So, how can companies buck the trend and focus their energies and investments on new products for long-term market viability and higher R&D returns? How can they counter-balance the shifting investments towards new growth areas so as to prevent clients from forsaking the impacted legacy products, straining relationships and disrupting revenues?

Symphony’s PLM Offering

Symphony Services’ Product Line Management (PLM) Services offers companies alternatives to manage the de-investment in mature products and drive transformation.

Symphony Services takes on end-to-end responsibility for selected products and product lines, from full PDLC and support services to sales and operational activities, all aligned against agreed-upon SLAs and using a global delivery model to reduce the cost of operations. Symphony’s offering is in sync with industry-recognized PLM best practices (Forrester Report, April 2009) that keep programs manageable, drive collaboration across the development process and integrate to downstream applications.

Through a diverse set of outcome-based PLM engagement models that enable clients to either retain revenues or focus on pure margins or maximize cash, Symphony guarantees the alignment of delivery to client’s business objectives.

• Symphony Services’ development team’s patented, repeatable process begins with a careful assessment of a client’s PLM needs to ensure that Symphony is perfectly aligned with their business goals.
• Symphony assumes full accountability for all aspects of the PDLC and business operation for targeted products. It assumes all contractual SLAs.
• Every product function is measured and analyzed for continuous product improvement.
• Key subject matter experts are reallocated.
• Budget and resource management is optimized through global delivery.