Into the Cloud (Cloud Computing‪)‬

Sam Tulip hears how Inovis--a provider of electronic business software and services for 20,000 companies globally--has helped Dell to use outsourcing and cloud computing to simplify its 5 million daily interactions with thousands of trading partners. As a pioneer in the direct-to-customer PC market, Dell has one of the top supply chains in the world and is known for its build-to-order customization and on-time product delivery. Dell fine-tunes its supply chain in real-time to ensure service excellence. But keeping its supply chain running smoothly took more than fine-tuning when the company decided to leverage and integrate original design manufacturers (ODMs) and greatly expand the number of global retail partners. The move to ODMs meant increased demand on the supply chain communications infrastructure. Instead of sending orders, updates, inventory data and tracking information back and forth to a few internal manufacturing units, Dell now needed to securely share this information with dozens of external manufacturers around the world--many of them with different hardware, software and business processes than Dell. Expanding the number of retailers meant even greater demands on the infrastructure. Hardware and software systems at Dell's data centre facilities would have to aggregate, process, and cross-reference millions more transactions with retailers each day.