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.