JDA and INTTRA: More partnerships to come this year

After announcing an integration partnership last week, both JDA and INTTRA separately told American Shipper more such arrangements are planned for this year.    The news that JDA Software and INTTRA are partnering to bring INTTRA’s ocean booking and shipment visibility tools into JDA’s transportation management system is pretty big for global shippers that use one or both of those systems.
   But the bigger news is that both companies separately told American Shipper that more such partnerships will emerge this year.
   JDA, a provider of TMS as well as warehouse, fulfillment, and inventory management systems, plans to use partners to round out its offering.
   Fab Brasca, JDA’s vice president, solution strategy, Intelligent Fulfillment, said the INTTRA partnership was about tapping into INTTRA’s established network, rather than trying to build that connectivity to ocean carriers and freight forwarders on its own. INTTRA handles roughly a quarter of ocean freight bookings globally.
   Brasca said it doesn’t make sense for JDA, which has been focused on its cross-product, division-spanning Intelligent Fulfillment initiative for the past year, to replicate that network. Instead, the focus will be on linking to other such networks in different modes and geographies to allow users of the TMS to more fully use JDA’s robust engines and feature set.
   INTTRA, meanwhile, sounded a similar note in a conversation with American Shipper last week, saying the partnership with JDA is the first of many as it seeks to integrate its core tools into more TMS platforms. Aside from JDA, INTTRA already powers ocean processes for logistics technology providers Kewill and Descartes.
   The notion of complementary software companies partnering is nothing new, of course, but the industry looks set for more of these arrangements to spring forth. For one, the ease of integration enabled by new building block IT infrastructure makes such partnerships more effective than ever.
   But more importantly, software providers appear to be retrenching and focusing on core competencies rather than trying to build proficiencies that have already been established by other largely non-competitive companies.
   INTTRA Chief Executive Officer John Fay told American Shipper his focus this year is on consolidating the company’s core offering – in essence, reaching more customers with its existing tools. The implication is that there is latent untapped demand for INTTRA’s tools, and partnering with companies like JDA gets those tools in the hands of more companies.
   It’s a trend to watch throughout 2016, but in the meantime, JDA’s TMS users just got access to the most pervasive ocean booking and shipment management platform in the business.