How do you stay agile, and at the same time, support a vast portfolio of products and customers?

Blue Yonder serves a large customer base of companies with a varied set of products and capabilities, all of which are leveraged uniquely by different customers. As great as this is, it also poses challenges beyond the simple need for constant innovation. Customers have their own pace of movement and adoption, which can sometimes give off the impression that the vendor is moving slowly. The additional challenge for Blue Yonder is determining how to bring the large customer base along the innovation journey.

Sure, we’re no longer a startup. We’ve been working with some of the biggest companies in the world for the last 35+ years. But that doesn’t mean our technology is stuck in the past. In fact, at Blue Yonder, we’re constantly innovating. We’re taking our years of domain experience in supply chain and continuing to modernize, marrying the old with the new. 

From our transformational shift to SaaS to leveraging Microsoft Azure as a platform, we continue to upgrade our offerings to serve our customers’ constantly evolving needs. We also have more than 400 patents granted and pending, which represents the largest patent portfolio in the field of supply chain management technology for any company or institution.

So, if you were to ask: “Is Blue Yonder a legacy software company?” we would (whole-heartedly) say: “No way.” Here are four reasons why: 

1. Integration & APIs

Our services-based architecture enables us to thrive in an environment that helps us consume, enhance, supplement, mine and analyze rich datasets to detect previously unseen insights across their supply chain network to solve their most complex challenges from planning to execution. Pre-packaged integration with custom back-end systems ensures seamless cross-functional flows across different systems.

This architecture not only accelerates the rate of innovation but also gives our customers a way to build their own robust applications and extensions, using the same services that power our applications.

As an example, many of our customers seamlessly integrate across our planning and execution processes using APIs. This allows companies to unlock the latent value of synchronizing plans and execution, boosting productivity and efficiency of operations. 

2. Ecosystem of Partners

Based on Microsoft Azure, Blue Yonder’s platform provides hyper-scalable services that support ingestion, harvesting, validation and sharing of supply chain digital assets. This is largely because our platform unifies rich internal and external data from our technology partners such as dunnhumby, FourKites, and Zebra Technologies, along with Big Data and Social, News, Events, and Weather (SNEW) sources.

And as we continue to rely on our partner ecosystem, we know that they can rely on us as well. Blue Yonder recently hosted DEVCON virtually where we addressed how customers and partners can build their value-added solutions on top of Blue Yonder’s Luminate Platform. This one-day event for Blue Yonder’s vast customer and partner network educated attendees on how to advance their technical knowledge of our solutions and the Supply Chain Management (SCM) Platform. 

Ultimately, Blue Yonder is leveraging new technologies to not only transform and modernize our platform but also enable our community of partners and customers to do the same.

3. Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)

Our acquisition of Blue Yonder in August 2018 enabled us to further modernize our platform and take full advantage of AI and ML, which we believe is the next frontier of opportunity for identifying productivity and efficiency within the supply chain. 

We truly believe that if you can learn from past decisions, you can build a more intelligent supply chain in the future and that’s why Blue Yonder is embedding AI and ML into every aspect of the supply chain. Within our 5,300+ associates, more than 100 are data science and machine learning experts. Currently, our teams are managing 260 innovation projects and our digital fulfillment technologies process 7 billion ML transactions per month.

And while other platforms tout their AI and ML capabilities, they usually operate under the “bring your own data” model. Blue Yonder, on the other hand, is in the business of generating ML models for just about any business case, like how to solve a demand planning problem in the CPG industry. Focused on purpose-built, finely tuned algorithms by vertical for specific problems, Blue Yonder is uniquely positioned to help organizations translate real-time data into faster, smarter, more profitable business decisions. 

4. Tailor-Made SaaS Solutions 

Blue Yonder has undergone a massive cloud transformation pivoting towards SaaS as its primary offering vehicle. We have more than 500 cloud customers and over 2 million users worldwide. In May 2020, Blue Yonder reported that SaaS revenue increased by 78% (compared to Q1 2019), while SaaS bookings increased 43% and SaaS annual recurring revenue (ARR) increased 77%, at an all-time high of $234 million.

Again, many vendors tout their platform offerings, but they require you to build your own solutions on top of it. In other words, they don’t sell you the menu in the restaurant, they sell you the ingredients and you must cook for the customer. Sure, this may be beneficial for a large enterprise that believes supply chain is its core competence and wants to add its own secret sauce. However, businesses lacking the expertise will struggle if this is their only option.

Blue Yonder’s platform offers the best of both worlds. Not only does it offer SaaS solutions that are tailor-made for specific verticals like manufacturing, retail, and others, but also it enables companies to build their own solutions on top of the system of record.

Years of Experience, Evolved

Blue Yonder, driven by our commitment for continuous improvement, has evolved as a brand and provider to keep pace with market realities. We may have 35 years of history, but we’re not the same company that was founded in 1985, and we won’t be the same company ten years from now either. As we continue to look toward the future, we continue to modernize our platform because it’s what our customers and the industry demand. Would you like to join us for the ride?

To learn more about our how our Luminate Platform is incorporating APIs, our ecosystem of partners, AI & ML, and SaaS, please visit us here.