Cloud-Based Supply Chain Management Offers SMBs FlexibilityCloud-Based Supply Chain Management Offers SMBs Flexibility

For small and midsize businesses that outsource manufacturing, managing the supply chain is crucial to success. Moving the cloud can allows business, customers, and supply partners lower costs and maintain flexibility.Amitive (previously known as Mitrix) stands behind the concept of "community" supply chain management (SCM). The company CEO, Amar Singh, contends that the realities of modern manufacturing have wrested direct control of the supply chain from businesses requiring management by influence.

While more challenging in some regards, the distributed nature of community SCM matches up with the distributed architecture of cloud computing. Thus it's no coincidence that Amitive has launched Unity 5.0, which the claims is the first SCM solution delivered in the cloud.

Sean Rollings, Amitive's VP Marketing, touts the fast, flexible, and affordable computing power Unity 5.0 offers to trading communities and notes, in particular, the value to SMBs, who he points out "face all the complexity that large enterprises do without the resources to address it. The midmarket doesn't have vast IT resources or vast budgets to bring in consultants and vendors," he says. "We [Amitive] can pull the complexity out and bring it to our data center."

Amitive claims that its patent-pending Unity 5.0 solution can dynamically scale, enabling each user's software capacity to automatically deploy and release virtual resources based on data volume and transaction loads. And perhaps most appealing, these features are available in a pay-as-you-go model and allow businesses to use any cloud they prefer, including their own private cloud, Amitive's private cloud, Amazon, Go-Grid, Google, or any other providers. Unity 5.0 also supports application migration across multiple cloud environments to allow flexibility in cloud providers.

To illustrate the Amitive solution in application, Rollings points to Orthera, a custom orthotics providers that is bringing customization to retail locations. Orthera is integrating Unity 5.0 to for its entire back office operations, from order entry at the retail location through offshore manufacturing with the custom orthotics launching this July.

In a statement, Joshua Greenbaum, principal, Enterprise Applications Consulting, said "Amitive is satisfying an important market requirement by delivering a SaaS-based SCM solution that is ideal for cost- and risk-averse supply communities. This latest version provides further value by allowing Amitive's customers to take advantage of critical advancements in the scalability, security, and reliability of today's more mature cloud environment."

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