i2 Technologies, Inc. (Dallas) expanded its strategic partnership with IBM (Armonk, N.Y.). The two companies will increase their investments in sales and marketing, implementation services, hosting and development to deliver the i2 hosted and subscription-based transportation management solution, i2 FreightMatrix.
Under the agreement, IBM's Global Business Services consultants will apply their knowledge of hosting services and transportation best practices to implement the i2 FreightMatrix solution. i2 and IBM will also collaborate on commercial development for industries including manufacturing, retail, and third-party logistics providers.
"We have shared several joint transportation engagements with IBM that have resulted in the successful delivery of our solutions to our customer base," said Razat Gaurav, v.p. of global transportation solutions, i2. "With our combined assets, IBM and i2 can jointly deliver domain and industry expertise."
As part of the expanded alliance, IBM will provide server and infrastructure management support for i2 FreightMatrix to help automate application hosting and management and provide a scalable platform for hosting the solution. The i2 offering is delivered to customers in a subscription pricing framework and is available globally for both the enterprise and small-to-medium businesses.
"Subscription-based pricing, which tends to be linked with [software as a service] deployment, is growing much faster than traditional pricing in the transportation management systems (TMS) market. On average, TMS vendors predict that 63% of their installed customer base will be on-demand by 2011," said Adrian Gonzalez, director, Logistics Executive Council ARC Advisory Group. "IBM's expertise with selling and managing [software as a service] deployments will enable i2 to scale its FreightMatrix solution and reach a broader customer segment. For IBM, this partnership provides the company with a technology platform to grow its business process outsourcing services in transportation."
