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E xperts from NII Holdings, Total S.A. and True Religion Brand Jeans gathered on the General Session stage at FOCUS 2013 to have a candid discussion about the value of cloud services. The panel featured Anthony Balducci, director of supply chain for NII; Richard Heinrich, manager of retail merchandising solutions for True Religion; and Fabrice Sasmayoux, business project manager for Total. The conversation was moderated by JDA Softwares Executive Vice President of Services, David Gai. What follows is an excerpt of that conversation.

Journey to the CloudA Candid Conversation About the Value of Deploying Technology in the Cloud

Richard Heinrich: Ive been with True Religion Brand Jeans for about two years. To me, its a relatively young company since Ive been in specialty retail for 32 years. The company started in 2002 as a wholesaler, and then in 2005 opened up its first retail store in Southern California. We have about 140 stores right now. We have full-price stores, outlet stores and also a third channel, which is our e-commerce business.

Fabrice Sasmayoux: Ive been working for Total S.A. for 17 years

now, and work in the strategy department, responsible for the

service station information systems. Total is ranked number five

in the oil and gas industry. We operate in 130 countries, from

extracting the raw product to the final customers. My branch is

in what we call the distribution part of the business. We operate

15,000 sites across 65 countries, and we are number one in Africa

and Western Europe.

Anthony Balducci: NII Holdings is a wireless service provider that operates under the Nextel brand in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Peru. We have about 11.5 million subscribers right now. Were in a very transitional period. Were moving to a 3G network and rolling out new services and new products. As the director of supply chain, I was involved in the RFP [request for proposal], the contract award, the vendor selection and the business case for the solution.

Before delving into their perspectives on the cloud, the panelists briefly described their companies and relationships with JDA. NII and True Religion are JDA Cloud Services customers, while Total, a legacy RedPrairie hosting customer, is in the process of migrating to the JDA Cloud.

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Support for cloud deployments can vary across industries and even within companies. The participants discussed how prolific the cloud strategy was within their organizations.

Heinrich: From the beginning, the executive and management committee supported deploying in the cloud. The complete IT team for True Religion is less than 10 people. Everything has been cloud-based. Were opening 20 stores worldwide this year, so our whole philosophy has been to do it in the cloud and outsource all of that expertise and all of that cost. Keep it lean and mean, and as long as the users are happy with the application and the support, thats all that counts. The users think of it as a black box. If its up and running 24/7, and it works fast, thats all they care about. They dont care if its in the cloud, and they dont care if its down the hallway in a basement. As long as they can log onto the system and be productive, thats whats important.

Sasmayoux: Our strategy is not to move all of our system into the cloud. Ten years ago, the hosted solution was considered the best solution. All sites are on our trusted network, and the connection has to go through our hub before reaching the JDA servers. For each country, we have a dedicated server and an airtight environment. Today, its completely different. We want to cut price and optimize so now weve started to group countries on the same servers, but every now and then we find downtime because of the massive amount of data generated by the business. The servers are being saturated, and every three or four years we have to go through an upgrade process. The upgrade process is a lot of work.

The next point is when we wanted to expand to Asia, we werent able to use our servers because of the downtime period, because of the time difference. So we would have had to start from scratch with new servers, and that would be much too expensive for a new affiliate so we gave up the idea. We feel that the current architecture limits our business, especially for all of the fast-growing countries, and we think that JDA Cloud Services will help both of our businesses, JDA and Total. Its really a win-win situation to come.

The panelists also touched on internal politics identifying which parts of their organizations were more willing to move to the cloud, as well as other departments where the conversations were tougher.

Sasmayoux: The cloud advocates would definitely be the business and IT part of the company. The adversaries we anticipate will be in the legal department. In Europe data protection is a very big and serious concern, so we have to

go through legal. The other part will be the IT security. We work on a trusted network, so we have to have all of the clearances to move forward.

Balducci: Our IT department was initially against the cloud. They wanted to do everything internally. In terms of security, that was one of the big issues they were concerned about. We structured it so that we have to either VPN into our network or we have to be on the network in one of the offices. You cant just go into an Internet caf and log in. You have to go through our network to get to the JDA solutions, which from a security standpoint is very good for us.

Heinrich: Our upper management wanted a cloud solution, but they wanted to make sure that certain criteria were met. Could they turn on a dime? If we had changes that needed to be made, could they make those changes? Do they have the resources available? How robust was the system? Would there be any lag processing time and things like that, because as you grow 20 stores a year, how scalable was this new service that we were going to get? I think everybody still wanted to go with the cloud, but they wanted to make sure that it could meet all of the needs of the users. I think that was the biggest concern with the cloud, how productive was it going to be.

Outside of the technology benefits, the participants also touched on the savings and business improvements theyve seen as a result of moving to the cloud.

Balducci: One of the things that we were looking at was, of course, getting the solution up and running as soon as possible. We had been addicted to Excel for many, many years. While it had been our friend, and it had been nice to us and made great tables and charts, it wasnt the optimal solution for purchasing about $1 billion worth of inventory a year.

So one of the things we looked at, obviously, with the cloud was how much is it going to cost. The other big thing was time to market. We looked at when we were building out these networks, and our IT department was extremely strapped in terms of timing. The cloud has allowed us to grow the business and not have to worry about the IT aspect of it. We can focus on getting the right product to the customer at the right time.

The other problem we had was with the cell phones because over the years, the shelf life has gotten shorter and shorter. When youre carrying 100120 days of inventory and a product only has a shelf life of 12 months, you can see how it runs out real quick. When Samsung comes out with Galaxy S4,

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guess what happens to the Galaxy S III? Its just not going to sell, so we have a lot of obsolete inventory. By being in the cloud, its allowed us to be flexible in terms of pulling back on our inventory levels, and we can grow quicker and have a more diverse portfolio. The cloud has really offered us a lot in terms of flexibility and reduced our business risks.

Heinrich: Im really a functional expert, and to me, the cloud is a big, black box. I dont want to deal with everything in that big, black box. I just want to make sure that black box works. All of my communication with JDA Cloud Services is via email.

I email my service delivery manager, and a ticket is opened up instantaneously, and someone is assigned that ticket. I can log into the ticketing system and see, Yes, theres my email. I want this new version of software, and I can tell them, Today is Monday. I want it installed on Saturday. I want to put it into my dev [development] environment, and thats all I have to do. The service delivery manager takes charge of everything. He gets the experts and the users together, and then I just monitor the ticket to see, Where are they in the process? Then I come in on Monday morning,

and the new version of the application is sitting in my dev environment.

Its the same process with the Oracle patches. When we upgraded to JDA Allocation version 8, JDA Cloud Services contacted me, and all I had to do was say, Upgrade the Oracle. All of the Windows server patches are applied weekly, so really everything is seamless to me with cloud services.

Somebody at JDA is working on those problems 24/7, so the turnaround and the expertise is very quick. And usually theyre prompting you to take action. Theyre saying, We need a response. We want to close this ticket. We have your solution ready. What do you want to do? Push the button. Thats the difference between doing it in-house and outsourcing it.

Want to hear more of the conversation? Visit jda.com/cloudpanel to view the panel discussion in its entirety.

This article originally appeared in Real Results Magazine, Volume 8, Issue 2, jda.com/realresultsmagazine 2013 JDA Software Group, Inc.