Supply Chain Interview
Building the total solution
Manufacturing & Logistics IT spoke with Hamish Brewer, president and CEO of JDA, about the company’s product rationalisation roadmap, the background and reasoning behind the acquisition of i2, JDA’s Managed Services and plans for future growth.
added, “but as time went by we realised that, other than in Transportation, if we came up head-to-head with i2 in competition nine times out of ten one of us was usually in the wrong place. So we realised that what i2 had to offer was actually rather different, and while, on the face of it, they had many products that had exactly the same names as those we offered, they did different things and had different capabilities. And those capabilities are important to the industries where they've enjoyed the most significant success.”
Superset Hamish Brewer: Convergence strategy. I 48
t has been an interesting period of evolution for supply chain solutions company JDA. With a background in retail, the past decade or so has seen the company acquiring key players within the manufacturing space to support its end-to- end supply chain vision. One of its most impactful acquisitions took place in 2006 when it bought Manugistics. And in January of 2010 it was announced that JDA had successfully completed its acquisition of i2 Technologies. “Back in 2006, if you had asked me if JDA would ever be interested in buying i2, I would have said ‘no, why would we? We've got Manugistics’,” said JDA’s man at the helm, Hamish Brewer. “Around that time we assumed that we would be regularly competing with i2 in the marketplace,” he
MANUFACTURING &LOGISTICS
IT
Brewer reflected that what has been particularly interesting since the i2 acquisition is the cross-selling opportunity of taking the strengths of i2 into areas that might not typically have been considered. “For instance, today we're taking some of the i2 capabilities
“ March 2011
Manugistics, so we have a convergence strategy in place. And by the end of 2011 or early 2012 we will have issued a release that will be a superset of both the i2 and Manugistics offerings. Then we can concentrate our R&D efforts on this one superset going forward.”
Managed Services
Brewer also spoke about another of JDA’s relatively recent developments; its Managed Services offering, which provides a wide portfolio of advisory, software management and operations services: JDA Application Engineering Services, JDA Application Lifecycle Services, JDA Hardware & Software Administration, and JDA Operation & Optimisation Services. “Managed Services is our response to providing our solutions as a service, because that's exactly how we do it,”
… if our customers want to buy from us as a service then they can do that, if they want a classic behind-the-firewall implementation from us then we can provide that too – it's very much up to the customer.”
into retail and, conversely, taking the capabilities of Manugistics into the i2 space,” he said. However, Brewer explained that JDA has a well-defined product roadmap for merging the strengths of these two forces together over the short term. “Because there are elements of overlap it makes sense to build one suite of products,” he said. “i2 has a Demand Planning tool and so does
he said. “So it's not like the classic
salesforce.com approach where you write a cheque and they send you your URL and off you go. There is a difference that I think is going to be required on an ongoing basis for the kind of solutions that we sell because of the variability that we have to deal with.
salesforce.com is
salesforce.com; you can modify it, you can adjust it, you can add data
www.logisticsit.com
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