That thinking now appears to be taking hold among their
larger brethren. “In the last 12 months, we’ve seen more
tier-one multibillion-dollar [enterprises] coming to the
same conclusions. Confidence [is] growing as more and
more types of apps move to the cloud,” Fenwick said.
COMMERCIAL SUCCESS ALLAYS FEARS
When it comes to building confidence, it’s hard to overstate
the effect that successful consumer cloud-based ventures
have had on the model’s public image. Although they
operate outside the logistics industry, players like the subscription entertainment giant Netflix and the customer
relationship management (CRM) specialist SalesForce.com
Inc. have amply demonstrated the feasibility of running a
thriving business on a cloud platform, experts say. That case
continues to build as public cloud service platforms such as
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud
Platform invest heavily in expanding their networks.
As these commercial cloud providers bulk up their com-
puting muscle, supply chain operations are starting to give
serious consideration to the cloud option for even their
said Steve Simmerman, senior director of North America
sales for JDA Software Group Inc. “Concerns about run-
ning WMS in the cloud is legacy thinking. A lot of things
run extremely well in the cloud.”
Even so, Simmerman acknowledges that there are still
pockets of resistance in the market to the notion of a cloud-
based WMS. In general, he says, the pushback comes from
In the end, the decision about running a WMS in the
cloud comes down to balancing priorities such as the cost of
buying servers and hiring IT staff against the need for data
security and fast response times.
