New GXS Analytics App to Live on Microsoft’s Azure Cloud

July 20, 2010 Alex Woodie

GXS, which completed its merger with Inovis in early June, is testing a new analytics application designed to give small and mid-sized businesses insight into their supply chain performance and information flows. The offering, called GXS Trading Partner Analytics, is currently undergoing beta tests on the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform.

GXS is positioning its Trading Partner Analytics as an on-demand extension to GXS Trading Grid, its flagship business-to-business (B2B) messaging service, which is used by more than 100,000 organizations for exchanging business documents such as EDI, XML, and flat files, across a range of protocols.

Trading Partner Analytics, which the company unveiled earlier this year, is designed to give Trading Grid SMBs an aggregate view of their business activitities occurring in the GXS B2B service. The vendor says it will tap data in customers’ Trading Grid mailboxes to extract insights and business “signals” that could be of use to a customer.

Some of the types of questions that Trading Partner Analytics will help to answer include: Am I getting more or fewer orders from this customer? Are my suppliers improving their performance, or are they getting worse? And which buyers generate the most purchase order changes?

GXS selected the Microsoft Azure cloud platform for its scalability and security, says Bobby Patrick, senior vice president of marketing at GXS. “Windows Azure provides unlimited computing power via a scalable, standardized platform,” he says.

Using the Azure cloud will also allow GXS to simplify pricing for its new Trading Partner Analytics app. GXS will adopt Azure’s “pay-as-you-go” pricing model, whereby users only pay for what they use.

GXS expects to make Trading Partner Analytics available near the end of the year. The offering is also expected to be made available to customers of Inovis (which has a good number of iSeries and System i customers using the TrustedLink software), provided they have adopted the Trading Grid service. The combined company is operating under the GXS name. For more information, visit www.gxs.com.