This morning, IBM announced that it would expand its Smarter Commerce initiative with the acquisition of leading spend management vendor Emptoris. IBM-Emptoris will likely be the last major event in what has been another busy year for B2B e-commerce. Not only have there been several mergers, IPOs and leveraged buyouts, considerable progress was made in [...]
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2011 will certainly be remembered as the year when cloud computing went mainstream. It has got onto the agenda of nearly every CIO around the world and you have not been able to visit an IT related website or read a business related journal without some sort of reference to cloud computing. When you look [...]
Read More» Orchestrating today’s highly outsourced, globally distributed high tech supply chains can be extremely complex. The activities of ODMs, contract manufacturers, 3PLs, distributors and aftermarket service providers must all be synchronized to ensure the right product is in the right place at the right time. In today’s high tech industry, companies are actually not competing with [...]
Read More» Over the past twelve months I have posted a number of blog entries relating to cloud based B2B integration and I will summarise these posts in a followup blog. In the meantime I thought it might be useful to try and highlight some of the more general things that need to be taken into consideration [...]
Read More» Today’s ERP environments are at the centre of many enterprise IT infrastructures, from managing employee or customer related information through to delivering information required to run complex production systems. Many people often regard an ERP system as being internally focused, however without reliable connections to outside trading partners, for example banks, suppliers or logistics partners, [...]
Read More» Toyota has suffered one of its toughest years in its history, the Japanese earthquake back in March severely affected Toyota’s global production capacity for many months and is only now starting to get back to some form of normality. Toyota was obviously not the only company to be impacted by the earthquake and they, like [...]
Read More» Cyber Monday is here! Although Monday is the official kickoff of the online holiday shopping season it certainly did not stop many consumers from getting a head start on web purchases this past weekend. Last year Forrester Research found that almost 49% of all consumers said that they shopped less in stores on Thanksgiving weekend, [...]
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Are you in the process of upgrading your Treasury Management System (TMS)? So are many other Global 1000 organizations. At GXS, we work with dozens of multi-national corporations each year embarking on treasury transformation projects. Some are seeking better information about offshore cash balances. Others are focused on hedging currency and interest rates. But one [...]
Read More» Earlier this year I posted a blog entry discussing why I thought Apple and Tesla Motors should try and form a partnership to exploit the growing interest in electric vehicles. The blog was recently picked up by a student at the University of Florida who asked me to provide some more thoughts on this idea. [...]
Read More» Tomorrow is the biggest shopping day of the year in the US – Black Friday. However, a more appropriate description of the day might be “Dark Friday” or “Red Friday” given the wave of violence that has emerged in recent years. In fact, the first references to “Black Friday” were not very positive. In 1966 [...]
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