Manufacturing and services firms are increasingly seeking out expanded, enterprisewide product life-cycle management (PLM) functionality to meet demanding product development requirements. However, the reality of supporting end-to-end PLM processes — defined by Forrester as the collaborative management of product information from inception to retirement — is putting pressure on IT to solve significant system implementation challenges. In the interim, before the vendors advance their own capabilities, application development professionals will need to step up and provide the know-how to make the usual mix of disparate PLM applications and data work together.