Collaboration between supply chain software provider and Google’s platform-as-a-service is intended to allow JDA to focus on building cloud-based applications for shippers’ intensifying e-commerce needs.
The supply chain solutions provider JDA Software on Wednesday said it will use Google to deliver cloud-based versions of its solutions.
JDA will use the Google Cloud Platform for public cloud infrastructure, to allow the software company to focus on product development. JDA’s solutions can be deployed on-premise or in so-called private clouds, but this represents the company’s first real foray into public cloud architecture. The Google Cloud Platform comes under a category known as platform-as-a-service.
The collaboration will be developed through JDA Labs, a Montreal-based innovation center JDA launched in 2014. JDA said it “will significantly accelerate the development of JDA’s next generation cloud solutions.”
“Google Cloud Platform offers the unparalleled speed, performance, scalability and reliability we need to launch truly differentiated solutions,” said Serge Massicotte, executive vice president and chief technology officer at JDA Software.
JDA has been increasingly positioning itself as the software vendor of choice for retailers tasked with managing the complexities of omni-channel commerce. It faces competition not only from traditional rivals like software provider Manhattan Associates, which tied up a similar deal for public cloud infrastructure with IBM in May, but also from Amazon’s cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services.
Analysts told the Wall Street Journal that JDA’s partnership with Google could be seen as a way to lure retailers away from a reliance on Amazon they’d rather not have.
“The supply chain and omni-channel industry is ripe to benefit from the innovation, scale and flexibility of our public cloud offering, and by betting on Google, JDA can now focus on creating high impact business solutions while quickly adapting to meet customer needs,” Dan Powers, director, Google Cloud Platform, said in a statement.
On a broader level, providing services in a public cloud environment also allows JDA to truly evolve from an on-premise provider of core transportation, warehousing, order, fulfillment and inventory management solutions to one that can more readily compete with a plethora of browser-based, software-as-a-service point solutions.
“The whole fundamental premise of IT has changed from large companies developing specific systems that reside within your organizations – the idea we can afford it and the little guys can’t – to universal information systems that cost almost nothing,” Ken Lyon, technology specialist and advisory board member for the London-based analyst Transport Intelligence, told American Shipper earlier this week. “The pendulum has swung.”
American Shipper research has found that deployment of on-premise solutions in key areas like procurement and transportation management has not dropped in the last five years, but that the use of software-as-a-service solutions, which are generally deployed via a public cloud, has gradually risen in that time. That growth comes primarily from companies that didn’t previously use a system.
The chief benefit of public cloud infrastructure is that it allows a technology vendor to leverage development costs over a larger proportion of its customer base, whereas on-premise or private cloud deployments tend to be highly individualized to a specific customer. Applications built on public cloud infrastructure also provide vendors the ability to scale and be flexible, a crucial dynamic in building technology to support retailers’ and manufacturers’ rapidly evolving needs around e-commerce.
“Established software vendors have a problem,” said Lyon. “They have built up structures to maintain different versions for different clients. But the costs to do that are becoming increasingly disconnected with the cost that newer vendors can provide one version to all their customers. Hypothetically, if it costs them $120,000 to support a customer, when those customers could find a similar solution for $5,000 – they can’t go and say ‘we can match that.’”
JDA to use Google for public cloud infrastructure
