The market where all Global Trade Management (GTM) vendors operates is characterized by early adopters. The market is competitive, rapidly evolving, and highly fragmented. One should only expect the intensity of competition to increase in the future. The competition might come from in-house development efforts, consulting companies, other software companies, logistic companies, customs brokers, forwarders, and third-party development efforts.

The number of standalone GTM vendors is quickly dwindling, because of mergers of SSA Global and Arzoon, TradeBeam and Open Harbor, Qiva, etc., and Kewill and TradePoint (which had previously acquired ClearCross) and one should expect the merging of GTM software technology and managed services to continue. These acquisitions may also indicate accelerated restructuring in the logistics services market is inevitable, given a plethora of point solution providers that specialize in narrow areas, from land cost calculation, visibility, collaboration, export compliance, trading document generation, hazardous material handling, to more complete transportation management capabilities.

There are, however, a number of remaining players in several niches?just enough to muddle the message nibble at the potential revenues of full-fledged GTM players. For example, we could talk about the remaining ITL players like NextLinx, Precision Software, Intermart, Nistevo, MercuryGate, Xporta, Tarrific.com, OCR Services, Importers Software Services, MSR Customs Corp., Questaweb, GT Nexus, and LOG-NET, global settlement players like Bolero.net, TradeCard and S1, and a number of vendors that arguably more specialize in SCEM, visibility and shipment tracking like Viewlocity, Descartes Systems, Management Dynamics (through recently acquired BridgePoint), Timogen, etc. But, none of these vendors handles all the requirements of automating global e-business, and some of these vendors have apparently already merged with or acquired other companies to provide more complete offerings.

Still, some companies that are comfortable with using freight forwarders to handle the details of cross-border movement and which may only want visibility of the critical events, like departed origin, estimated arrival date & time, arrived at customs, cleared customs, etc., may be served well by SCM vendors and stand-alone SCEM and visibility solutions. Namely, both supply chain planning (SCP) vendors like i2 Technologies, Manugistics or Logility and supply chain execution (SCE) vendors like Manhattan Associates, RedPrairie, HighJump and Provia offer visibility and trading partner collaboration components to provide transparent inventory, orders, and shipments across the entire trading network. These systems do not typically have the capability of sharing demand forecasts with suppliers, but, in addition to such products like i-Supply, there are players like OneNetwork, weSupply, RiverOne or Valdero.

Furthermore, to build a complete and fully-functional GTM system, any user enterprise will have to integrate it with transportation management systems (TMS), ERP, SRM, partner relationship management (PRM), and other adjacent enterprise applications. We might be then talking about a full-fledged logistics resources management (LRM) system that would provide total ?command and control? over the entire spectrum of global logistics activities. This would include transportation procurement contracting, shipment planning and optimization, load tendering, trade compliance, customs reporting, shipment and inventory visibility, warehousing, reverse logistics. Additionally, these would be conducted over the Internet, so that all internal managers and trading partners can access information. But, at this stage, there is no such thing as a native LRM application that covers all these bases.

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