AUSTIN, Texas – September 9, 2011 – V-Chain Solutions, Inc. has teamed up with the Austin Technology Incubator (ATI) and the University of Texas Artificial Intelligence Department to accelerate development of a revolutionary technology called Swift Response that enables companies to automatically pinpoint problem areas or potential events within their supply chain that could disrupt operations. V-Chain is leveraging the renowned Artificial Intelligence talent pool at the University of Texas. The Austin office is the fourth V-Chain location, with additional offices in San Francisco, Atlanta, and Dallas.

Swift Response gathers and shares information across the entire supply chain horizon from customer to trading partners. It reveals problems deep within the supply chain that could potentially disrupt business operations or worst cause a loss of consumer confidence.  The technology blends with other existing business systems and is non-disruptive to the company’s operation.  Swift Response is ideal for companies that use two or more enterprise software solutions to drive their operations.

“We are excited about the opportunity to work with the ATI and the University of Texas. I have made Austin my new home and I look forward to bringing more tech jobs to the Austin Community,” said James Vinson, president and founder of V-Chain.

V-Chain is currently offering demos and pilots of Swift Response to early adopters. James Vinson will be speaking at the Sales and Operations Planning Conference in Boston September 15^th and 16^th (http://www.theiegroup.com/SOP_Boston/Overview.html), and the Demand Planning Conference in San Francisco at the 3:30pm session on September 19^th (http://www.altamont-group.com/event_brochure/BusinessForecasting2011.pdf).

About V-Chain Solutions, Inc.

V-Chain Solutions is dedicated to increasing business value by aligning people, processes, and technologies. V-Chain places value on integrity, innovation and accountability to customers, partners and shareholders. We provide the means to assess and manage improvement projects that deliver a significant return on investment to our clients. V-Chain’s vision is to create a Supply Demand Visibility Network in which companies are guaranteed efficiency.  Visit www.vchainsolutions.com for more information.

For customers interested in learning more about V-Chain products:
Customer Center: 888-990-4446, sales@vchainsolutions.com

About the Austin Technology Incubator

The Austin Technology Incubator is a not-for-profit unit of the IC2 Institute of The University of Texas at Austin that harnesses business, government and academic resources to provide strategic counsel, operational guidance and infrastructure support to its member companies to help them transition from early stage ventures to successful technology businesses. Since its founding in 1989, ATI has worked with over 200 companies, helping raise close to $750 million in investor capital. For more information, visit www.ati.utexas.edu.

Austin, Texas (PRWEB) September 12, 2011

The Austin Technology Incubator (ATI), a not-for-profit unit of The University of Texas at Austin, has selected V-Chain Solutions, an emerging enterprise technology provider of Supply Chain Execution & Analytics solutions, for its Landing Pad Program. V-Chain will be working with the University of Texas at Austin Artificial Intelligence department to roll out a revolutionary technology called Swift Response, which enables companies to automatically pinpoint the root problem areas within the supply chain operation before they become disruptions to the business.

ATI’s Landing Pad Program supports early stage technology companies by leveraging ATI’s network and community insight to accelerate a company’s acculturation into Austin’s ecosystem. V-Chain Solutions is a Supply Chain Execution & Analytics Technology provider who enables companies to run more efficiently and respond faster to changing conditions in the marketplace. Its new corporate headquarters in Austin is the fourth V-Chain location, with additional offices in San Francisco, Atlanta and Dallas. Austin’s leading tech environment and rich entrepreneurial community first led V-Chain Solutions to the flourishing Central Texas area, as well as the opportunity to work with ATI and UT Austin’s Artificial Intelligence department.

“We are excited about the opportunity to work with ATI and the University of Texas at Austin. I have made Austin my new home and I look forward to bringing more tech jobs to the Austin community,” said James Vinson, President of V-Chain Solutions.

Swift Response consolidates the transactional activities from multiple supply chain systems, enabling companies to have a single environment where they plan, execute, analyze and communicate across their entire supply chain, while increasing productivity by 200%. The technology blends with existing supply chain systems and is non-disruptive to the operation. Swift Response analyzes every supply chain transaction, which drives real time compliance.

The Swift Response technology has received numerous awards in its early stages: the 2010 Concept to Reality Award, the 2011 Georgia Bowl Business Plan Competition, and the 2011 Global Venture Labs Outstanding Market Award.

V-Chain is currently seeking development partners and early stage adopters to pilot the Swift Response solution. The Swift Response Technology is available to medium to large enterprises that use two or more transactional-based systems to drive their supply chain operations.

“We are thrilled to welcome V-Chain Solutions to ATI as a new Landing Pad company. We look forward to helping them grow their business and providing them with networking opportunities with local tech entrepreneurs, venture capital investors, UT Austin researchers, and potential customers,” said ATI IT Portfolio Director Robert Reeves.

James Vinson will be speaking at the Sales and Operations Planning Conference in Boston September 15th and 16th (http://www.theiegroup.com/SOP_Boston/Overview.html) and the Demand Planning Conference in San Francisco at the 3:30pm session on September 19th (http://www.altamont-group.com/event_brochure/BusinessForecasting2011.pdf).

About the Austin Technology Incubator
The Austin Technology Incubator is a not-for-profit unit of The University of Texas at Austin that harnesses business, government and academic resources to provide strategic counsel, operational guidance and infrastructure support to its member companies to help them transition from early stage ventures to successful technology businesses. Since its founding in 1989, ATI has worked with over 200 companies, helping raise close to $750 million in investor capital. ATI is a key program of the IC2 Institute at UT Austin. For more information, visit http://www.ati.utexas.edu.

About V-Chain Solutions, Inc.
V-Chain Solutions is dedicated to increasing business value by aligning people, process, and technologies. V-Chain places value on integrity, innovation and accountability to customers, partners and shareholders. We provide the means to assess and manage improvement projects that deliver a significant return on investment to our clients. V-Chain’s vision is to create a Supply Chain Visibility Network in which companies are guaranteed efficiency through the use of visualization, collaboration and system consolidation. Visit http://www.vchainsolutions.com for more information.

A panel of judges selected from Georgia’s business and financial communities chose V-Chain as the winner after considering the likelihood of successful short-term startup, the long-term profit and market potential, the ability of the management team to successfully implement their proposed plans, the returns provided to their investors for the risks incurred, and the quality of each team’s presentation overview.

V-Chain, representing Kennesaw State University, beat out competitors representing University of Florida, University of Louisville, Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia Southern, University of Manitoba, and Johns Hopkins University. This is V-Chain’s second consecutive business plan competition win after gaining top honors from Kennesaw State University’s 2010 Concept-2-Reality Competition in December 2010.

“We are extremely proud of winning the Georgia Bowl Business Plan Competition, especially given the very impressive field of competitors,” stated James Vinson, President of VChain. “Being chosen by a panel of judges made up of leaders of industry in the Southeast gives us further validation that our business concept is robust and can solve a current unmet need in supply chain.”

VChain’s win provides automatic entry to both The 2011 Global Challenge of Moot Corp®, held at the University of Texas in May 2011, and “Venture Labs®”, dubbed the “Super Bowl” of all business plan competitions. These collegiate events provide various awards in the form of cash prizes and equity investments that could reach millions.

About Georgia Bowl® Business Plan Competition

The Georgia Bowl® was founded in 1991 by Dr. Charles W. Hofer, Regents Professor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship, at Kennesaw State University. Founding co-sponsors were BDO Seidman, a leading accounting and consulting firm specializing in services to entrepreneurial organizations, and the Business and Technology Alliance, a non-profit organization of Georgians interested in technology development in the State of Georgia.

About V-Chain Solutions, Inc.

V-Chain Solutions is dedicated to increasing business value by aligning people, process, and technologies. We analyze the daily, weekly, and monthly transactional activities that enable companies to respond faster to changing conditions in the market place while providing early warning to potential issues that can cause supply chain disruption. V-Chain’s vision is to create a Supply Chain Visibility Network in which companies are guaranteed efficiency through the use of visualization, collaboration and process standardization.

For customers interested in learning more about V-Chain products: Customer Center: 415-655-6810, or info@vchainsolutions.com.

Miscommunication is the leading cause of supply chain glitches. The traditional approach to supply chain management fuels the problem of miscommunication by creating scattered clusters of inaccessible, unshared information (“information silos”).

Studies from Forrester Research, Ventana Research, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and V-Chain Solutions revealed that this problem exists in medium sized to large enterprises with 5 or more applications that drive their business.

This white paper explores the impact of supply chain miscommunications, and discusses a pragmatic path towards eliminating supply chain disruptions with supply chain visibility—a single version of the truth that combines data silos to provide insight previously.

This paper presents an overview of Business Intelligence. Beginning with the history of
BI, then giving a definition up to the present day, and forecasting BI’s future
development, the paper offers insight into some of the market demand trends that are
shaping the BI solutions of tomorrow. Last, the paper provides a summary of the major
BI vendors, and their current market perspectives.

History and Evolution

The earliest reference to non-business intelligence occurs in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War,
written during the 6th century BC. Sun Tzu claims that to succeed in war, one should have
full knowledge of one’s own strengths and weaknesses and full knowledge of one’s
enemy’s strengths and weaknesses. Lack of either one might result in defeat. A certain
school of thought draws parallels between the challenges in business and those of war,
specifically: collecting data, discerning patterns and meaning in the data (generating
information), responding to the resultant information.

Before to the start of the Information Age, businesses often had difficulties in collecting
data from non-automated sources. Furthermore, businesses lacked the computing
resources to analyze their data properly, and often were forced to make business
decisions based primarily on intuition.

As businesses began to automate more systems, more data became available. However,
collecting that data was still a challenge, due to a lack of infrastructure for data exchange
or as a result of incompatibilities between systems. Analyzing gathered data and
developing reports sometimes took months to generate. These reports did allow for
informed long-term strategic decision-making, but short-term tactical decision-making
continued to be based on intuition.

Leading into the present, technological advances, automation, and better standard setting
have created vast quantities of available data. Data warehouse technologies such as Data
Cubes provide a means by which to store this data. Improved Extract, Transform, Load
(ETL) and, more recently, Enterprise Application Integration tools have enhanced the
rapid collection of data. OLAP reporting technologies have allowed for faster generation
of reports by which to analyze this data. Business intelligence has now become the
science of sorting through large amounts of data, extracting the relevant information, and
transforming that information into knowledge upon which actions can be taken. In this
way, data can progress through a lifecycle of increasing value, as depicted in the chart on
page 2.

At its core Business Intelligence is the extraction of useful information gathered from
data sources that adds value to the company. Business Intelligence technology, in its
simplest form, facilitates the gathering of data from its original source(s) and its
presentation to business users.
Complete Business Intelligence
solutions today have evolved to
gather information from disparate
internal (operational systems) and
external (market intelligence) data
sources, to help analyze
information in the appropriate
context, to present this information
to business users in various
departments and at various levels
in a format to fit their needs and to
facilitate collaborative decision
making – with the goal to
improve performance. In
improving performance, a new
concept rises in prominence–
Performance Management.

BI and Performance Management

Ventana Research asserts that Performance Management will be the competitive
differentiator for this decade. They define it:

Performance Management is the leveraging of assets to better understand,
optimize, and align strategies and processes to improve effectiveness throughout
the enterprise to create additional value for the company.

The key section of the above definition is, “…to improve effectiveness throughout the
enterprise…” This is the concept that defines effective Performance Management. In the
past, performance enhancement initiatives were largely implemented in single
departments or divisions of companies, without an overarching strategy behind them.
Performance Management effects improvement on a company-wide scale, using metrics
and standards spanning from end to end of an organization. Taking an interdepartmental
collaborative approach, Performance Management initiatives synchronize both process
and strategy toward the goal of overall company efficiency.

Performance Management initiatives are driving adoption of BI technology. Based on a
study conducted by Ventana Research, Business Intelligence is the most utilized software
approach today and planned in the future for measuring and monitoring business
activities and processes to improve performance. However, the adoption of Performance
Management initiatives necessitates a new approach to Business Intelligence.

Past BI deployments were often limited to individual departments, resulting in
information localized to a specific problem or area. As new needs or problems came up,
companies created or purchased a separate BI tool to address them. What companies are
starting to realize is an abundance of disparate BI tools, which is decreasing the value of
Business Intelligence. This goes against the very essence of Performance Management.
Performance Management is heavily dependent upon precise information; therefore, it
demands a collaborative means of producing information. With different BI tools
accessing information, different information can be the result – marketing forecasts one
number, sales getting another number, finance getting yet another number, and the CEO
is wondering which is right.

The BI solution that companies are looking for must be capable of delivering visibility at
all levels and throughout the entirety of the company. This means it must be able to
deliver both high-end strategic knowledge at the executive level and insight into day-to-
day operations at the end user level.

Market Demand for BI

Companies have come to recognize the necessity of a strong BI component in optimizing
their businesses, both at the strategic and a tactical level. In fact, BI has been
acknowledged as the crucial technological concern; as a recent survey of 1,400 CIOs
conducted by Gartner Group found that Business Intelligence has become the top
technology priority for the year 2006.

One of the major trends shaping the market demand for BI solutions, as mentioned above,
is the push toward standardization and consolidation. According to Forrester Research,
the majority of companies have multiple BI tools, some having as many as 10 to 15.
Companies are realizing that effectively managing their BI tools gives a huge competitive
advantage over companies that simply deploy BI tools without a unified plan, lowering
costs and increasing performance.

The effect on the vendor side of the BI market has been a rush toward developing a more
standardized, consolidated BI solution. However, no complete BI solution exists on the
market. While some BI vendors, such as Cognos, Business Objects, and SAS Institute,
offer multifaceted BI solutions, certain deficiencies prevent each from successfully
answering the compete needs of the market.

Current Industry

The current BI industry encompasses over 200 companies, offering a varying range of BI
tools and solutions. However, a group of large BI vendors holds the majority market
share.

The first tier of BI companies, with annual revenues in the $700 million to $1.5 billion
range, is occupied by Cognos, Business Objects, SAS Institute, and Hyperion Software.

Currently, the Tier 1 companies are focused on coming out with a product that satisfies
75 to 80% of the market need, and turning to niche solutions from smaller companies for
the remaining demand.

A second tier of BI companies, with annual revenues in the $200 million to $300 million
range, is occupied by Information Builders, MicroStrategy, and Actuate. One could also
classify Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, and SAP as tier 2 BI vendors. And while BI sales
account for a relatively small portion of these companies’ overall revenues, BI has
become an integral part of their overall products.

At this time, the Tier 2 companies are on very shaky ground, having to make a decision
to either merge with or make an acquisition of another BI company in order to vault up to
Tier 1, or be acquired by a Tier 1 company.

This analysis obviously does not apply to Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP. Instead, the
challenge faced by these companies is to strengthen their positions in the BI market.
Oracle in particular has had problems in establishing their BI presence. The strategy these
larger companies have adopted has largely been to acquire smaller BI companies in order
to bolster their own solutions. An example of this would be Oracle acquiring Siebel, and
then incorporating Siebel analytics into the Oracle BI product line. Another would be
Microsoft’s recent acquisition of ProClarity, a Tier 4 BI vendor. This strategy of
acquisitions is also being practiced by the Tier 1 BI companies, with an example being
Business Objects’ acquisition of Crystal Decisions, and integrating its Crystal Reports
application with Business Objects’ overall BI solution.

The third tier of BI companies, with revenues in the $40 million to $60 million range, is
occupied by Proclarity, Applix, and Panorama Software, as well as a few others.
Formerly, Siebel would have been classified as a tier 3 BI vendor for their analytics tools.
However, Siebel has recently been acquired by Oracle, so their market share is now
incorporated into Oracle’s. The fourth tier of BI companies is comprised of the numerous
BI vendors with annual revenues below $40 million. In fact, most of these companies
bring in revenues significantly smaller than the $40 million threshold.

The Tier 3 and 4 BI companies tend to address a specific need in business intelligence,
and then are usually swallowed whole by a larger BI company if the product is attractive
enough.

At the periphery of the BI market exists a number of companies that cannot be classified
as pure BI vendors, yet nevertheless offer something very similar to a BI tool. Significant
companies within this category include Ascential (a subsidiary of IBM), SPSS, and
Teradata. Also, a number of tier 2 ERP vendors offer BI tools, companies such as
Lawson Software and Extensity (formerly Geac).

Summary

Business Intelligence is not a new technology. In fact, the underlying precepts have been
around since 6th century BC, during the Warring States Period in China. The Information
Age has ushered in a new era of technology, which has revolutionized the gathering,
storage, and manipulation of data. The concept of Business intelligence is actually very
simple. Gather data and transform that data into valuable information. Due to technology
and the large amounts of data it can produce, Business Intelligence has now becomes the
science of sieving through large amounts of data, extracting pertinent information, and
turning that information into knowledge upon which actions can be taken. The purpose
of Business Intelligence is to provide a clear understanding of a company’s own inner
workings to improve performance throughout the company. This draws parallel to
effective Performance Management, which is driving adoption of BI technology.
Performance Management initiatives are expanding the scope of today’s BI offerings.
Companies are realizing that they have an abundance of BI tools, and that, if they
continue implementing disparate BI tools, they will suffer severe penalties. Due to
mandates to reduce costs and improve performance, companies are demanding a
standardized BI solution to eliminate costs of current and future BI implementations. The
market demand for a standardized and consolidated BI solution is quickly changing the
current BI industry, which encompasses over 200 companies, offering a varying range of
BI tools and solutions. However, a group of large BI vendors offering solutions
comprised of several BI applications holds the majority market share. Smaller BI vendors
who are offering solitary BI applications are in danger of being acquired by larger BI
vendors who are looking to further expand their current BI offerings.

Read the full article on SpendMatters.com

Read the full article on SCMR.com.

Today’s companies, will face continued pressure to harmonize supply chain operations within a function (e.g., procurement consolidation or enterprise-level transportation management) and squeeze out further efficiency improvements from existing deployments (e.g., spend analytics driving sourcing improvements or extending a warehouse management solution to support multiple warehouses/fulfillment models).

They are looking to increase the productivity of the people they already have. The switch is from pure cost cutting in 2009 to cost avoidance through productivity gains in 2010.”

On the technology side, “The trend for 2010 and beyond is that supply chain-centric software technology firms will continue to develop their solutions on a single platform which runs on one technology stack with one data model,”

Read the full article on SCIDigest.com

Ready the full article on Gartner.com

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