Supply Chain Management

Bob Irwin, Sterling’s CEO, in his inaugural note gave an interesting view to differentiate Sterling (read best of breed packaged applications) from the big daddies of the world (read Oracle & SAP). His take was that ERPs make perfect sense for stuff within the four walls of an enterprise but if your business model comprises of external enterprise then something like Sterling Commerce has an edge. Am sure one could come up with numerous rationales to counter this but in the world where everything is getting slotted among an Oracle, SAP & “others” economies, having some such punch line makes those falling in the “others” category, feel better. Given the M&A spree of Oracle & SAP, how fruitful will this approach be going forward is anyone’s guess but with a majority of my annual targets hinged with Sterling Commerce, I’ll be first to get impacted either ways.

Shuttling through sessions while trying to schedule / unscheduled multiple meetings and ad-hoc discussions, the few thoughts that struck me included the whole concept of going On-Demand. With eyes on ATT’s (parent company) muscle power to host/manage/sell such a solution, Sterling is going ahead with a strong on-demand focus as part of their product plan for the next couple of years. However, I personally am still struggling to get convinced if on-demand order management could ever be an enchanting alternative for large organizations especially retailers for who OMS is bread & butter. On abruptly throwing this question to Ian Finley (VP, AMR Research) during our luncheon, the response was that it could be a parallel revenue stream for SMBs but will take a while to catch on with large corporations. If you add the perspective that unlike TMS, which does not have any direct consumer involvement till the time they get the product delivered fast and cheap, OMS / ecommerce has a huge consumer experience aspect of it which could be a do or die for several retailers and hence could be a strong deterrent. The other key theme from the product road map was to enhance the user interface trying to better integrate the selling suite with capabilities of business administration functions being enabled through the UI. This would be a right move from a purview of customer experience with Web 2.0 features but the concept of business users managing the content as well as configuration seem to be somewhat contradicting the on-demand theme where you’d be using it with minimal control.

To conclude, I’d say that Sterling Commerce is definitely living up to their promise of integrating applications with their base technology platform (BIS) which they made while acquiring Yantra Corp. How far will they be able to take the concept while continuously trying to keep a Oracle or SAP to run it over, will be an interesting journey to observe…

Author - Gurpreet Kalra, Industry Lead - Supply Chain Management