DALLAS — Sterling Commerce yesterday announced plans to migrate most of its supply chain management applications to the cloud, and laid out its strategy for continuing to add access to its applications from the iPhone and other mobile devices.
At its annual Customer Connection conference here, Sterling said the order management, configure/price/quote, and catalog/offer management portions of its Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Suite supply chain management platform are now being offered as cloud-based services that customers can pay by subscription. The company also introduced its new Drop Ship application, available only via the cloud.
Sterling officials said the latest cloud-based offerings are only the beginning. “We will enable virtually every solution we present in an as-a-service approach,” said Joel Reed, Sterling senior vice president for product management and marketing, in a keynote session here.
Sterling’s decision to shift most of its Selling and Fulfillment Suite offerings to the cloud actually represents something of an ongoing strategy. Already, half of the company’s products are available as cloud-based services. The bulk of those offerings, however, hail from the B2B integration side of Sterling’s business. The Sterling Collaboration Network and Sterling Commerce Managed Services, for instance, have long been offered this way. Now the company is adding more of its Selling and Fulfillment Suite applications to the list. The Transportation Management and Inventory Visibility offerings from that product set have already been available as cloud-based services.