Partly Cloudy With A Chance Of Scattered Pigeons

By now even your Gran' Maman knows that the much-vaunted cloud is nothing more than a bunch of server farms, kept under roof in secret hideaways just outside far distant locations.

The server farmers are not simple growers, clad in Oshkosh B'Gosh, JCPenney plaid, and sturdy work boots. They are, rather, technogeeks, nerds from some silicon centroid, a curious mix of West Coast laid back and East Coast driven.

We forgot about them for a while, content to let SCM applications reside "up there", with occasional  worries about security, financial stability, and whether SaaS was a for-real phenomenon. But, rising from a deep slumber, The Cloud is back, landing with both feet on the universe of SCM. It's not just about having a convenient place to stash all your mis-remembered passwords, and not caring where your execution applications are actually running.

Today, we are looking at TMS and Global Trade Management as probable cloud-resident technology, adding to the roster of SCM applications as catalogue offerings and/or Saas options. Overall, cloud-delivered SCM offerings are growing staggeringly faster than traditional solutions.

And, the big kids are taking over the game, with SAP, Oracle, and JDA dominating the market. Growth appears to be driven by companies that want or need to get into the current century with technology at something less than the national debt, and vendors-suppliers who quake at the possibility of getting left out of continuing business recovery and growth.

The topic, in total, deserves deeper and wider investigation and coverage - so much is going on, with smaller, specialized, providers invading the space, and their customers getting aggressively creative about how to leverage cloud-based capabilities.

Hold on tight. This ride gets more exciting with each loop-de-loop.  And keep your eyes peeled for pigeons overhead; it's still possible to get splatted from above.