Agile Software Corporation, was a San Jose, California based company that provided product lifecycle management (PLM) software. In February, 2005, Agile Software Corporation acquired Cimmetry Systems Corporation, a privately owned software developer specializing in enterprise visualization, for approximately US$41.5 million in cash. Cimmetry Systems Corporation became a wholly owned subsidiary of Agile Software Corporation. Agile Software Corporation operated as a public company, with shares trading on NASDAQ. On 15 May 2007, Oracle Corporation announced that it would acquire Agile Software Corporation through a cash merger for US$8.10 per share, or approximately US$495 million. On July 16, 2007, Oracle Corporation completed the acquisition of Agile, which became a wholly owned subsidiary.

Aras Corporation is an American developer and publisher of product development software, Aras Innovator. The product is used for product lifecycle management (PLM) and other purposes. Since 2007, Aras has been providing Aras Innovator for free as open-source software, with Aras Corp providing technical support, software updates, and other consulting as a subscription service. Aras Corp was founded in 2000 in Andover, Massachusetts by Peter Schroer. Aras Innovator is an enterprise software suite for managing complicated product lifecycle management business processes. The software is based on the Microsoft .NET Framework and SQL Server. The product is used for product lifecycle management (PLM), advanced product quality planning (APQP), lean product development, product quality control, collaborative product development and new product introduction (NPI). Until 2007, Aras sold their product as proprietary software for enterprises. In 2007, Aras began providing Aras Innovator as open-source software. Clients obtain the software for free, and Aras Corp provides technical support, software updates, and other consulting as a subscription service.

Collaborative product development (collaborative product design) (CPD) is a business strategy, work process and collection of software applications that facilitates different organizations to work together on the development of a product. It is also known as collaborative product definition management (cPDM).

Digital obsolescence is a situation where a digital resource is no longer readable because of its archaic format: the physical media, the reader (required to read the media), the hardware, or the software that runs on it is no longer available. A prime example of this is the BBC Domesday Project from the 1980s, although its data was eventually recovered after a significant amount of effort. Cornell University Library’s digital preservation tutorial (now hosted by ICPSR) has a timeline of obsolete media formats, called the “Chamber of Horrors”, that shows how rapidly new technologies are created and cast aside.

End of life announcement (EOLA) is the beginning of the End-of-life cycle for a hardware / software product. The EOLA will precede the Last order date (LOD) by up to 90 days. Customers need to order before LOD if products/spares are needed. JEDEC standards specify End of life cycle of Product life cycle.

"End-of-life" (EOL) is a term used with respect to a product supplied to customers, indicating that the product is in the end of its useful life (from the vendor's point of view), and a vendor stops marketing, selling, or rework sustaining it. (The vendor may simply intend to limit or end support for the product.) In the specific case of product sales, a vendor may employ the more specific term "end-of-sale" (EOS). The time-frame after the last production date depends on the product and relates to the expected product lifetime from a customer's point of view. Different lifetime examples include toys from fast food chains (weeks or months), mobile phones (3 years) and cars (10 years).

Enterprise Data Management (EDM) is the ability of an organization to precisely define, easily integrate and effectively retrieve data for both internal applications and external communication. EDM is focused on the creation of accurate, consistent and transparent content. EDM emphasizes data precision, granularity and meaning and is concerned with how the content is integrated into business applications as well as how it is passed along from one business process to another. EDM arose to address circumstances where users within organizations independently source, model, manage and store data. Uncoordinated approaches by various segments of the organization can result in data conflicts and quality inconsistencies – lowering the trustworthiness of the data as it is used for operations and reporting. The goal of EDM is trust and confidence in data assets. Its components are:

Last Order Date (LOD) is the date before which customers can buy a product & after this date, it's mainstream support has been ended. This is part of the Product lifecycle as specified in JEDEC standards.

Life cycle thinking is an approach to becoming mindful of how everyday life affects the environment. This approach evaluates how both consuming products and engaging in activities impacts the environment but it not only evaluates them at one single step, but takes a holistic picture of an entire product or activity system. This means when talking about a product and taking a life cycle thinking approach, what is actually being evaluated is the impact of the activity of consuming that product. This is because by consuming a product, a series of associated activities are required to make it happen. For example, the raw material extraction, material processing, transportation, distribution, consumption, reuse/recycling, and disposal must all be considered when evaluating the environmental impact. This is called the life cycle of a product. The overall idea of making a holistic evaluation of a system's effect can be defined as life cycle thinking. Life cycle thinking therefore also can be applied to the consumption of other socio-economic activities such as watching a movie, making arts and crafts, cooking dinner, or even doing homework. For example, renting a movie, which seems to be a harmless activity, would involve burning gasoline to drive to the video store, using electricity to power the television and DVD player, and consuming power from the remote’s batteries. However, when trying to analyze quantitatively the effects of life cycles, limits to evaluation are subject to what assessment approach is taken because the chain reaction can become so complex that it could require decades to figure out the life cycle of a specific process. Life cycle thinking overall is a way to become more mindful of the complexities of consuming products and engaging in activities and how they affect the environment.

Planned obsolescence or built-in obsolescence in industrial design and economics is a policy of planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life, so it will become obsolete (that is, unfashionable or no longer functional) after a certain period of time. The rationale behind the strategy is to generate long-term sales volume by reducing the time between repeat purchases (referred to as "shortening the replacement cycle"). Producers that pursue this strategy believe that the additional sales revenue it creates more than offsets the additional costs of research and development and opportunity costs of existing product line cannibalization. In a competitive industry, this is a risky strategy because when consumers catch on to this, they may decide to buy from competitors instead. Planned obsolescence tends to work best when a producer has at least an oligopoly. Before introducing a planned obsolescence, the producer has to know that the consumer is at least somewhat likely to buy a replacement from them. In these cases of planned obsolescence, there is an information asymmetry between the producer – who knows how long the product was designed to last – and the consumer, who does not. When a market becomes more competitive, product lifespans tend to increase. For example, when Japanese vehicles with longer lifespans entered the American market in the 1960s and 1970s, American carmakers were forced to respond by building more durable products. A counterexample is Moore's law, stating that the rather competitive electronic industry plans for double computer capacity every 18 months, and the software industry plan for new program versions that require double computer capacity every 18 months.