Is Now the Time for Cloud WMS?

Throughout most of the software industry generally, and in the supply chain specifically, the move to “Cloud-based” solutions has been accelerating rapidly.

What is happening? The reality is that today’s Cloud-based solutions are simply the latest in a series of approaches for software implementation in which the solutions are deployed outside a company’s own infrastructure.

Previous terms for this approach have included “hosted” solutions, “on-demand,” software-as-service (SaaS) and now Cloud.

While these terms all connote the general approach of remote application delivery, there are some differences in today’s Cloud-based solutions versus these earlier concepts. Hosted or on-demand solutions, for example, often involved deploying software for a given customer on a dedicated hosted server, in some cases using a front-end technology such as Citrix to deliver the application screens to users. These were not true web-based solutions.

Cloud deployment, however, is truly web-native, and uses newer technologies to allow solutions to run across multiple computers (server farms), harnessing as much computing power as a given user needs at any moment in time, without needing to purchase or lease a giant server to meet occasional processing spikes.

Cloud-based supply chain solutions are rapidly gaining share, and will likely prove the dominant approach in just a few years.