While this news is ‘Breaking News’ it certainly is not surprising news. Having worked at Inovis for a year and a half it was easy to see it coming. The worst event that happened at Inovis was getting the Dell outsourcing deal. Yes it was a huge deal although with outsourcing Inovis can’t recognize all of that revenue right away and it was in the vicinity of 25 million dollars. There were however so many promises made to Dell for software changes to meet their requirements that it paralyzed Inovis. Inovis developers worked practically 7 days a week to meet the demands of Dell and these demands and changes were daily. While Inovis continues to use TLe in an outsourcing model because of BizManagers inefficiencies in translation, BizManager is used for communication of data for Dell. There has been so many demands put on Inovis by Dell that there is actually a Dell version of BizManager.

This has not allowed Inovis to be proactive to the rest of their customer base. This has prohibited any worthwhile upgrades to any of the Inovis product lines. Inovis was caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Certainly they could not fail to produce for Dell and lose that business and have that news get out. That alone would have destroyed their outsourcing business. On the other side getting that business dragged Inovis into the abyss.

I would be somewhat surprised if the GXS VAN would be sunsetted given the small number of customers Inovis has on Inovisworks in comparison to GSX. Inovis boasts a Tier 4 network but that is great for powerpoints and marketing really. As far as software it should be interesting to see what happens. Inovis never had a Webforms solutions that had the slightest feature/functionality required to compete. TLe is still the original Harbinger product, TLi is the original Premenos AS/400 product, and BizManager is the original IPnet product all of which is pretty old technology by todays standards.
Inovis does have a product known as Actionable Intelligence but they don’t sell that product because of its complexity. Actionable Intelligence is a service that a customer can utilize ‘after’ signing up for the Inovis VAN and then Inovis builds it.

All in all it should be interesting to see how all this plays out next year

Sometimes, it really makes Me wonder what it is that sales people “read” when they read an article or a posting on a website…?

Why do they always think that the only solution is their solution…? In looking at the article I wrote, I can see how you may think that I’m saying so many EDI enabled retailers and suppliers have EDI issues… but I’m not… I was simply mentioning how some issues come up and need to be addressed… and taken care of … and that any EDI implementation - whether in house or using SaaS - is going to have issues come up that you need to be prepared for and that you will need to consider and think about… and how maybe - just maybe - if you make sure that everything is tied down, you’re not going to lose something…

It all depends on what your definition of “one division to another” is. I highly recommend calling Inovis Tech Support. They can answer any questions you may have and maybe even answer questions you didn’t think of! Hope that helps.

-Meg