Supplychainer.com has a new post talking about supply chain solutions offered as on-demand (software-as-a-service) services.  The ultimate conclusion is that the market will mature for such solutions, but the prediction is it will take about 10 years.  I’m much more bullish than that based on what we see for our on-demand service.  My comment to the blog post below.

** My comment **

Our Response Management solution - which empowers people to respond to supply chain changes - is delivered as an on-demand service today.

We sell to large manufacturers across a variety of verticals.  We’re seeing extremely strong interest in on-demand as companies continue to outsource much of their IT infrastructure.

Very importantly, our on-demand service provides exactly the same full functionality as our prior on-premises offering.  It is not a first generation solution with limited capabilities - so we don’t encounter that obstacle.

You are correct in that some people are initially concerned about data - but when they stop and think about how much data is already outside their walls because of the pervasive outsourcing they’ve done, they get much more comfortable with an on-demand service.  In fact, a huge value that we provide is the ability to actually regain visibility into that outsourced data because that is critical to enabling effective response to change.

I don’t disagree that some vendors will take a different approach to offering an on-demand service and run into issues - but it doesn’t have to be that way.

I think the market will be “mature” much sooner than 10 years, I think we’re at the early stages of a very strong demand that will become mainstream inside of 5 years.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 11:11 pm and is filed under On-demand, Products, Response Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.