Manugistics touts new apps, new management blood, at user conference
Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 12/1/2003 7:00:00 AM
The last few years haven't been the best of times for best-of-breed supply chain planning software vendors, including Manugistics—but times are changing. This notion—and the evidence for it—became the subtext to the vendor's recent Envision user conference held in Washington in late October.
The best sign of Manugistics' improving fortunes may just be in its ability to attract management talent. Eight software industry veterans who joined Manugistics as VPs in recent months after stints at the likes of SAP, PeopleSoft, i2, and IBM—plus new Manugistics president Jeremy Coote—have bet big that Manugistics is set for a rebound.
Manugistics' strong customer base of 12,000 companies, its products, and the ability of those products to drive supply chain improvements attracted Andrew Zoldan, formerly with SAP and i2, as VP of solutions and product management. "If you want to be in the supply chain software business, you don't have that many choices if you want a company that has good products and is viable," Zoldan told MSI at the conference.
Zoldan holds that "Manugistics has a different mission, partnering with companies to help them actually master their supply chains. More than just selling software, it [means] being involved with supply chain initiatives."
Manugistics CEO Gregory Owens contends that with "a turn upward" in the economy, the time is right for a vendor that can offer significant supply chain improvements. "To put [it] in perspective," says Owens, "during a downturn, user-company CIOs may consolidate systems among steps to reduce costs. But with an upturn, department managers insist to their CEO that they be allowed to choose specific solutions they're convinced will operate their business unit as profitably as possible."
On the product front, Manugistics—which in recent years stressed solutions for pricing optimization—was talking up supply chain management applications closer to its roots. These include a framework for "secure" business planning, adaptive planning, RFID-enabled solutions, and a new "SWARM" architecture for distributed computing that is said to break down highly complex planning processes into manageable tasks.
New VP for global alliances, Gene Eubanks, whose resumé includes a stint at SAP, says Manugistics did well to survive the "awful economic climate of the past three years—not just still standing but performing."
While Eubanks hasn't felt this type of confidence "since I was with SAP in the early '90s," he concedes that Manugistics was in need of certain fixes: "The go-to-market strategy had to be more hell bent. That's the reason why Jeremy [Coote] joined."
