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.