A six-year-old provider of SaaS-based supply chain management tools has unveiled a new version of its product that is optimized to run in cloud environments such as those offered by Amazon and Google.

Amitive Inc. today released Amitive Unity 5.0, a version of its suite for outsourced manufacturers that, the company says, uses cloud computing environments to manage multi-enterprise supply chain communications around such things as forecasts, shared capacity, inventory, and business goals. Unlike other supply chain management tools, which tend to optimize processes around plant capacity and utilization, the Amitive Unity tools focus on synchronizing supply and demand across global, multi-enterprise supply communities.

Key to the new 5.0 release of Unity, said Sean Rollins, Amitive marketing vice president, are new automatic load balancing and resourcing routing capabilities that allow the tools to take full advantage of the on-demand computing resources offered by cloud environments. The load balancing and resource routing features allow the Amitive tools to scale up performance and computing resource utilization when supply chain activity is high—such as during a retail promotion—and to scale down when activity is lower.

This, said Rollins, will put more power in the hands of manufacturers, first by paying only for those computing resources that are used and, second, by providing more options for where supply chain management systems are deployed. Besides running in public clouds such as those provided by Amazon and Google, Amitive Unity 5.0 can also be deployed in Amitives’s private cloud or in cloud environments behind a manufacturer’s firewall.

“Historically, companies have built data centers to accommodate peak capacity, so they get low utilization,” said Rollins. “In a cloud environment, you can massively scale, but you only need to scale to accommodate present use, so you only pay for what you use.”

Amitive uses a pricing system that is based on utilization as well as which of its software modules are used. Rollins estimated that taking advantage of the new load balancing features will allow Amitive customers to reduce average monthly charges from around $15,000 to $10,000. The new features in Unity 5.0 also will make it easier for customers to pilot new capabilities in limited, pilot programs.

Customers wishing to run Amitive Unity 5.0 in a public cloud environment would need to make arrangements directly with cloud computing providers, said Rollins. Amitive expects to announce partnerships with cloud computing providers at a later time, Rollins said.

So far, no customers have implemented Amitive Unity 5.0 in a public cloud environment, said Rollins. Ten customers in a variety of industries—including high tech, automotive, steel, and industrial machinery—have implemented the earlier version of Amitive Unity. Among them is Orthera, a maker of custom-made orthotics which is using Unity to manage entire processes, from accepting retail orders to scheduling off-shore manufacturing.

Founded in 2003, Amitive is targeting manufacturers with between $100 million and $2 billion in sales. The company’s CEO, Amar Singh, was formerly senior vice president at SAP in charge of supply chain and PLM product development for that company.

Amitive expects to compete with other SaaS-based supply chain management service providers such as E2open and Kinaxis, Rollins said.