Earlier this year, GXS embarked on several fronts to dramatically improve end user performance for global supply chains, especially in emerging geographies, such as BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China). We did this not to address any particular shortcomings, but to address the opportunity to ensure a high-performance supply chain end-to-end. The key to adoption across global supply chain participants - small and large - is (surprise, surprise) a great end user experience. As easy as Google. As useful as Excel. As enjoyable as the iPhone. And so on.

A little over a month ago we announced our global alliance with Verizon Business, which gave us a powerful underlying network between our data centers and beyond. And today, we unveiled the results from recent efforts to Akamaize various Web-based applications and tools on GXS Trading Grid. The result has been nothing short of tremendous. In less than six months, we have seen performance improvements in excess of 40% for global supply chain users. In fact, for GXS Trading Grid customers in Guangdong, China , we doubled the performance and responsiveness of the applications they depend on to collaborate with their U.S. retailers. And, their U.S. retailers depend on this automation for their competitive advantage.

This performance boost for GXS Trading Grid applications, such as GXS Order Lifecycle Visibility and GXS Logistics Visibility, is nothing short of a religious experience for end users. Speed matters. The success of their business and their customers business depends on it. And, I have the customer emails to prove it!

Partnerships are so often underappreciated.     No doubt this perception comes from the mass of ‘barney partnerships’ that accurately characterize many relationships that are void of any real commitments and rarely produce more than a press release.    

But if you really want to serve customers the best solution, strong partnerships are essential.   It is difficult for even the largest companies to build great technology, serve every market, and understand every customer pain-point with equal zeal and passion.    

In EDI-land, partnerships of great consequence have historically been few and far between.  This is partly due to an over-reliance on slow-moving standards organizations which acted as the primary conduit between organizations.   Don’t get me wrong, standards organizations have a very important role.  It’s just not to innovate.

Several years ago, GXS made a radical commitment to elevating the strategic value of EDI by working with partners.   We wanted to solve major adoption barriers by working with partners to make access to EDI ubiquitous and easy.   We wanted to transform EDI into a valuable and cost-effective tool to directly improve cross-enterprise business processes.    As a result, we have amassed a roster of productive partnerships that have reenergized EDI, broken down previous adoption barriers, and generated new levels of customer excitement.  (See www.gxs.com/partners)

Last month we were awarded the top prize by START-IT magazine for our partnership with Microsoft.   This was the gold medal.  START-IT’s charter ‘Power of Partnerships’ premier award.    It was not only exciting to get this award because it comes from the customer viewpoint (START-IT covers manufacturing) which proves critical validation, it also provides many GXS’ers with real recognition on the importance of their work behind-the-scenes truly integrating both companies products to deliver a real solution.   With this partnership we combined great software customers love to use – Microsoft BizTalk and Microsoft SQL Server – with a sophisticated on-demand integration service – GXS Trading Grid – and created an integrated supply chain automation experience like never before.   Call it ‘Supply Chain at your Fingertips’.  Actually, there is more cool innovation to come in that arena… but that is for later.

Bottom line.  For customers, when businesses enter into meaningful partnerships deliberately and with real long-term commitment, two leaders are better than one.