Purchase to accelerate speed and integration across global supply chain operations
Purchase to accelerate speed and integration across global supply chain operations
GXS last week announced that it had acquired software-as-a-service (SaaS) enterprise community management software firm RollStream.
By combining RollStream products with the GXS Trading Grid, GXS said it expects to enhance the performance of global business and supply chain operations for its customers.
The acquisition also deepens GXS’s commitment to the “social supply chain,” a vision that it said “brings together information flows and information workers to break down barriers hampering supply chain efficiency”.
“Our customers realise they need a balance of people, process and technology to compete on a global scale, and they know that the human side of B2B [business-to-business] integration matters,” said Bob Segert, GXS chief executive.
Putting integration into the cloud
“RollStream is one of the more innovative startups to enter the B2B integration market in recent years. At GXS, we are firm believers that integration belongs in the cloud and the RollStream acquisition enables us to accelerate this vision.”
The acquisition is the culmination of a business partnership between the two Washington DC-based companies that began in 2009.
The RollStream’s SaaS platform is designed to benefit global procurement teams by accelerating supplier setup by up to 60 percent, according to the company. Its ‘social’ dimension can simplify exception handling and supply chain collaboration. And its hosted model can be used to improve supplier contact accuracy with self-service updates and provide a single source for sales forecasts, supplier communications, and project rollouts.
RollStream is also known for its web 2.0 user experience and interface, developed on the Ruby-on-Rails open source web development framework.
The GXS RollStream service is available today and will be internationalised and available with local language support by first quarter of 2012.
Terms of GXS’s acquisition of RollStream were not disclosed.
