What Analysts Say

Adrian Gonzalez, ARC Advisory

“Agile’s strengths include the service oriented architecture (SOA) of its parcel shipping solution which simplifies the carrier compliance process and provides clients with greater flexibility in enabling shipping processes. Agile has a team of parcel shipping domain experts.”

John Fontanella, AMR Research

“Parcel shipping management is an arcane science, unlike that of any other mode of transportation. While the parcel industry has consolidated to only a few carriers, each has its own rules, regulations, and certification procedures. Traditional transportation management system (TMS) vendors have shied away from building software to support the function because it requires not only separate logic and content, but it must also be continually updated to stay in compliance with individual carrier rules.

However, the opportunity of using the sophisticated optimization routines many TMS vendors possess on parcel shipments is too great for the vendors or their clients to ignore. This is particularly true for Sterling Commerce, as it supports its customer base of multichannel retailers, distributors, and manufacturers. For most of them, parcel represents a sizeable segment of their transportation spending. The chance to reduce it by consolidating to less-than-truckload (LTL) shipments or creating zone-skipping opportunities is a critical feature.

Because of the complexity of meeting ongoing carrier compliance mandates (and rather than writing its own software), Sterling partnered with Agile Network, a fast-growing collaborative of software value-added resellers that specializes in this segment of the supply chain market, both in North America and Europe . Several other enterprise software companies, including Lawson for its M3 suite, have also opted to use Agile Network software instead of building it themselves.

For Agile Network, selling through enterprise application vendors as well as directly to customers is a sustainable model. It benefits all parties—the end customer included—by bringing specialized functionality to market as either standalone software or as a product combined with partner functionality.”