Study Evaluates Worldwide Global Trade Management Vendors

IDC Manufacturing Insights today announced a new IDC MarketScape report that provides a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the characteristics that explain a vendor's success in the global trade management (GTM) marketplace and help assess current and anticipated performance in the marketplace. The new study, IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Global Trade Management 2014 Vendor Assessment, assesses the capability and business strategy of five of the key GTM vendors including Amber Road, GT Nexus, Integration Point, Oracle, and SAP. This evaluation is based on a comprehensive framework and set of parameters expected to be most conducive to success in providing GTM capability both in the short term and in the long term...

Key findings of the report include:

• While all of the vendors included in this IDC MarketScape bring notable capability to the space, they don't all cover all three of the areas identified under GTM.
• Of the five vendors included in this report, Oracle and SAP provide GTM capabilities within a much broader set of tools, and their choice by manufacturers or retailers may be appropriately influenced by existing IT infrastructure, including other supply chain management (SCM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP).
• SAP is the most "global" of the vendors included in this report, with significant application revenue from clients across multiple regions.
• The criteria used in the global trade management IDC MarketScape are across dual dimensions of strategy (future plans and where the vendor is headed) and capability (where the vendor is today in terms of capabilities). Each of the elements within strategy and capability is then assigned a weighting based on the relative importance of each criterion in the opinion of IDC Manufacturing Insights and feedback from manufacturing and retail users.
• Across the vendors included in this report, there are more similarities by sub-industry than there are differences, but as manufacturers and retailers evaluate different applications, it can be useful to understand where a particular vendor has direct sub-industry experience, partially for things like item classification and customs and regulatory compliance.
• This IDC MarketScape is a starting point for manufacturers and retailers that are looking at the GTM space but does not replace the "due diligence" that companies must then do to evaluate which vendor is ultimately right for them.

This has been excerpted from the 3 October 2014 article by Digital Journal.