When we set out on our journey in 2004 to transform our VAN into a real-time services-oriented network (GXS Trading Grid), we were making a big bet that customers would increasingly embrace the on-demand proposition and that B2B e-commerce in general would once again be relied on for new sources of competitive advantage.  Today that seems obvious but as recently as 36 months ago, on-demand was scarcely a term and B2B e-Commerce was not even on the boardroom’s back burner.

Thanks to SOA, web services and centralized meta-data repositories, creating integrated experiences and mashups, we knew early that we needed to build the Grid to embrace partners, with APIs and schema libraries exclusively for their use.  Today, our strategic partners include Microsoft, webMethods, JDA, eBridge, IVANS, EDIsoft, EPCSolutions, Zebra, Symbol and the list goes on.  

No question, these partnerships help us create value for our customers at terrific speed.    While the bits may be technically ‘loosely-coupled’, our strategy with our partners is definitely ‘tightly-coupled.’  So, last week when it was announced that webMethods will be acquired by Software AG, the collective marketing teams of both companies spent hours working through impacts and scenarios.  Fortunately, this merger is great news for GXS and our customers from every perspective.    (Feel free to scan our official statement on the acquisition at http://www.gxs.com/gxs/newsroom/gxs-ag-software.htm).    

While I can say with high confidence that Microsoft will never be acquired, in a world of increasingly tightly-coupled technology partnerships, it will be important for companies to know the partner eco-system their service providers rely on.     I guess this really is no different than when a CIO’s CRM or SCM or ERP provider is acquired and the analysis he or she must go through.  In this case, tightly-coupled partnership just puts the scrutiny in the hands of the CMO, not the CIO!