Our Customer’s Success is Our Success

This important statement is one of GXS Core Beliefs. It’s one that I heard fellow GXS’ers use this week over and over during one of our customer forums. It really reigned true when I listened to six Fortune 500 customers each give detailed presentations on the business performance benefits they get from B2B Outsourcing. These were proud moments.

I’d like to share a few other facts from this forum that really demonstrate movement in software-as-a-service and B2B outsourcing (without sharing anything under non-disclosure):
- There was a 1.6x increase in customer attendance versus 2006 (the event facility was at capacity so we actually had to have a live video feed into another facility);
- Customers from the Brazil, UK, Germany, and Japan joined, indicating broad adoption outside of North America;
- We introduced separate tracks this year for the physical supply chain and financial supply chain. Interestingly, there was more cross interest by industries normally represented in each chain indicating exciting new scenarios emerging!

At the end of our forums, we always hold a ‘+ / delta’ session….what worked, what could we change. An interesting ‘delta’ recommendation came up. The suggestion was why don’t we attack some of our competitors “outrageous” claims that they do what we do. My going mode has been to stay above that line and prove our leadership with real customers and successes…customers who proudly place their brand next to ours… such as our recent customer award winners. Still, it’s good feedback.

Maybe I’ll blanket www.gxs.com with our competitors names to improve search engine ratings like the practices of some small competitors… no way. That will never be our marketing strategy. We are focused on customers. We have the successes to prove it.

Bobby

We are committed to reducing our carbon footprint and helping our customers achieve their equally eco-friendly goals. GXS Trading Grid® Ultra was designed with specific requirements to reduce the environmental impact of secure data center operations. Our ‘Green-by-Default, Design and Operations’ initiative represents an unmatched commitment within the On-Demand industry to helping achieve a sustainable environment. The initiative includes the following components:

• Green-by-Default. Technology partners for Ultra infrastructure are selected based on the contribution their technology has to green initiatives and their emphasis on reducing their carbon footprint. Fact: Trading Grid Ultra’s blade architecture design with software virtualization will reduce the number of servers and CPUs by over 50%

• Green-by-Design. Ultra is designed for peak loads, high-availability and disaster recover greatly reducing unnecessary idle operations. Fact: Ultra design will be ~25% more energy efficient than other distributed architectures that typically are only 20% utilized

• Green-by-Operations. Ultra reduces physical complexity greatly reducing our data center space and power requirements. Fact: Ultra will reduce data center air cooling load over 25%

With Trading Grid Ultra, GXS is eliminating energy-intensive traditional mainframe operations globally. Our ‘raised-floor’ data center space requirements will be reduced by over 90% by the end-of-2009 while supporting load and capacity anticipated to increase over 300% during the period.

We will provide more details shortly via a new Ultra microsite. However, I was so impressed with the foresight of our operations team to take ‘green’ in to serious consideration years ago when designing Ultra that I had to share some of the details early.

This morning we announced 2007 GXS Customer Award winners for innovation. I think it is a great sign that each year we get a longer list of spectacular customers entering the contest. It is also great to see these customers use the Grid as it was once only envisioned: a feature-rich, on-demand B2B integration services platform. Our panel of judges at AMR Research narrowed down the contestants to four winners.

They are tremendous stories of innovation. They are great success stories for our managed services and demonstrate huge value creation from B2B Outsourcing. Panasonic is using the Trading Grid to gain visibility into their global shipping processes to increase market share for Plasma sales in Europe and North America. At Tesco, they are completely digitizing their entire accounts payable and invoicing function. I can’t share the ROI numbers, but they are significant. It takes real courage to get to 100% automation! PepsiAmericas uses the Trading Grid for their customer data integration efforts so they can better serve customers regardless of requested format, transaction type and protocol. Finally, International Post Consortium is demonstrating great innovation by using RFID technology and GXS Trading Grid together to track-and-trace international packages throughout the European Union.

Underpinning all of these success stories (and the great successes of all of the other entrants that did not win but are still great) are some common elements. Real-time transaction flow (EDI, XML, Internet EDI, EPC, etc). Any-to-any message translation. Visibility and control applications. Document and message tracking. Intelligent Web Forms. And so on. And, underpinning those cool services is a power integration-as-a-service engine. An engine built with a powerful identity management (for secure identity, context, accounting and billing) bus, high-performance orchestration and introspection services for all messages, and centralized data stores, all on top of Trading Grid Ultra technology (with dual-continent fail-over offering the highest level of disaster avoidance). Okay, enough on the Grid.

For more info, check out our Customer Awards Page.

Following up on my previous post regarding the movie filming at our HQ, a colleague at GXS sent this picture from our fifth floor balcony. He thought it would be good to actually show some of ‘their’ supply chain.

Last night the filming for an upcoming movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe was in full swing at GXS headquarters.   It was quite the scene.   I’ll admit I was a little worried that our vice president of global product management was going to join the paparazzi.  You can learn more about the movies at the IMDb.

I could not help but compare the shear elegance of their efforts with that of our customers and their massively diverse supply chains.   Some 200+ actors, extras, set construction works, security, and others pulled together their production with synchronous beauty.   Our customers - torn by two great opposing forces, increasing globalization of supply with still prevalent localization of demand - aim for the same synchronous, flawless execution.

It reminded me of our 2007 advertising campaign that shares similar stories.  So much goes on ‘behind-the-scenes’ of supply chains to pull together the perfect toy, car or clothes.

This one titled “Supply chain integration is what you don’t see.  A flawless performance is what captivates you” shows the immense behind-the-scenes efforts to pull off the perfect show.

Another great one shows the perfect bike for the perfect customer…a happy kid.  Titled “Chain from China. Tires from Texas. P.O. from Peru.  We put all the pieces together.”

In essence this is what Supply Chain and B2B Outsourcing is all about.   Its about helping customers pull off the perfect product…the perfect performance…for the perfect customer.     You can see the whole campaign at www.gxs.com/gxs and click GXS 2007 Advertising Campaign.   I hope you like them as much as I do.  We really tried to convey the aspirations of our customers, the emotions from their success, recognizing the immense ‘behind-the-scenes challenge they face everyday.

This hour Microsoft launched an important release to BizTalk Server 2006, called R2.  Don’t ask me why they did not just call it BizTalk Server 2007.  At this point, they could have even pulled off 2008.  Frankly, the release is significant enough in my mind.  Certainly, the hours we put behind developing automated interfaces with GXS Trading Grid warrant it.  But, R2 works. 

One thing that is particularly cool in the new version is the automatic fashion by which a BizTalk user can synchronize trading partner information automatically with their customers on-line via GXS Trading Grid.   Embedded, pre-configured Web services make requesting, formalizing, mediating and testing a new trading partner relationship a snap.  It really is as simple as the great ‘1-Click’ Amazon Prime feature or the easy-to-use ‘Accept’ button on LinkedIn.  It’s called GXS Trading Grid for BizTalk Server.

When Microsoft selected GXS Trading Grid in 2006 as its recommended network for BizTalk Server, we simultaneously took the opportunity to work with BizTalk with equal enthusiasm.  After all, BizTalk is the most popular integration software package in the market, with (my guess) 40% market share by number of customers.   **Note, Microsoft highlights GXS on the new BizTalk R2 home page in several places (http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/default.mspx) including support for GXS Trading Grid for BizTalk Server and recognition of our gold medal ‘Power of Partnerships’ award from START-IT Magazine!

What does this mean practically?  A customer using Microsoft BizTalk to integrate their internal business applications can – via a single connection to GXS Trading Grid – integrate with one, ten, hundreds, or thousands of trading partners regardless of the protocol (http, ftp, AS2, etc) and message formats (EDI, RosettaNet, CIDX, PIDX, etc) required by each partner.  Last week, we helped one BizTalk customer, for example,  easily integrate with a set of partners requiring support for TRADACOMS – an EDI standard popular in the UK. 

In B2B integration, exciting times are just beginning.

There is an air of excitement that hits every September coming off the heels of August, and this one is no exception.  With the kids back in school and vacations now seemingly a distant past, I am feeling compelled to write down a bit about why this year feels better than ever.  As one GXS developer said in the hall yesterday, it feels great busy making history.

Of course, with the filming in-progress of an upcoming Leonard DiCaprio and Russell Crowe film at our headquarters, that can makes things feel really different.  No joke.    Our global headquarters is a massive 300,000 square foot facility on a beautiful lake providing an awesome setting reminiscent of the large  CIA complex.  I don’t think any GXS’er has made the cast yet, though I am sure there are a hopeful few.

The GXS Trading Grid is really showing its strength.   From reliability offering as many 9’s as customers need, to speed offering custom forms, maps, business rules development in days versus weeks, to performance with dual-continent data replication or akamai-zed web front ends, to flexibility with ‘plug-in’ integration for JMS, SAP, Ariba, Microsoft Dynamics, Quickbooks and more, the technical infrastructure is unmatched.    

But, it’s the functional capabilities that are most exciting as they solve real business problems for our customers.  With our ‘Program-the-Grid’ initiative, we have made it easy to extend our services across any externalized process.   For example, in Logistics our teams are extending visibility across data flows representing container conditions, booking activity, BOL instructions and more for several new big customers in Japan, the U.S. and the U.K.   Ah, perhaps a global trend!  (Note Ryan Kraudel’s presentation at EDIFICE 102th Plenary today: http://www.gxs.com/gxs/newsroom/pr/2007/09062007.htm) soon to be posted on edifice.org.).    Other processes making major advancement include invoice automation and compliance, payments visibility, and trade visibility.

Our service delivery organization with well over 500 people operating multiple centers of excellence and providing 24×7 global process orchestration and monitoring, are broadening our managed services capabilities every day.   (Note more managed services momentum with Fairchild Semiconductor http://www.gxs.com/gxs/newsroom/pr/2007/09052007.htm).    Some of their new tools are really exciting…for example, our Business Activity Monitoring team has just deployed  a new complex event processor …which helps the team immediately make sense of supply chain activity and to identify important exceptions for activity that did…or did not…happen on behalf of our customers!

We will unveil many of these innovations across our technology, people and processes in our Trading Grid 2008 launch.   Until then, there is arsenal of activity about to be unleashed to take B2B integration-as-a-service to the next level.  Stay tuned.