Duncan Angove is an enterprise software industry veteran, having served in senior executive roles at companies including Retek, Oracle and Infor. Just four weeks ago it was announced that Angove would take the top job at Blue Yonder, formally JDA Software, to help scale the supply chain management vendor in the cloud.
Blue Yonder has aggressive plans to become the SaaS supply chain vendor of choice for consumers, at a time when supply chain disruption is on the minds of companies worldwide. Procurement issues of goods and services are well documented in diginomica and many organizations are assessing how they can best future proof their supply chain management solutions for the future.
It’s a place Angove has been working in, or working near, for most of his career. Speaking to diginomica this week, he explained how joining the company as CEO felt like an obvious choice for him – given his history in supply chain management. Angove says:
My whole life has fallen on this company. I mean, my first job out of university in London was at Anderson Consulting [now Accenture]. And one of the first projects I had was implementing a warehouse management system at Selfridges. Their warehouse was actually the four levels of underground basement under the shop on Oxford Street, and we put in a WMS called McHugh Freeman, which became RedPrairie, which is now part of Blue Yonder. That was my very first job.
Then I was at Retek, and JDA, now Blue Yonder, was our number one competitor until it went public. So all the assets that make up Blue Yonder, I’ve intersected with them throughout my life.
I really know the space and I really know the assets. And so when this opportunity came, it was as if there was a closed loop poem that would end here. I know a lot of the employees and obviously I know all the customers.
Blue Yonder was acquired by Panasonic at the beginning of last year for around $7 billion, and it has since been suggested that the company may be heading for an IPO to help grow it further. Blue Yonder is investing heavily in its SaaS capabilities, driven by its Luminate Platform, and through partnerships with Microsoft Azure and Snowflake. The end goal is a highly scalable, industry-focused supply chain management suite that uses data to predict and fulfill customer demand.
Commenting on his ambitions for the Blue Yonder under his leadership, Angove was clear. He says:
There are very few multibillion dollar scale players in supply chain management. You have Workday in HR, Salesforce in CRM, ServiceNow in IT management, but no category killer in supply chain. It was Blue Yonder. That’s the opportunity, to become the Salesforce or the Workday of the supply chain,
Obviously there are players that surprise Supply Chain Management, like an Oracle or a SAP, but this is an add on functionality. It’s not best in class, right? Blue Yonder is truly the only best in class, billion dollar supply chain SaaS company. And that’s really hard to do.
Accelerating roadmaps
Angove said he sees many similarities between Blue Yonder and Infor, where he was President for several years and helped oversee the company’s remarkable transformation into an industry-focused SaaS ERP player . He explained that the supply chain is similar because the functionality for individual verticals is very different and then running those in the cloud is not easy to do. Angove added:
But Blue Yonder has tons of functions and features that actually support the nuances of how you run a supply chain and every vertical.
Angove’s background is in engineering and he proudly describes himself as a ‘product guy’. He explained that his main focus at Blue Yonder in the short to medium term is accelerating the roadmap, advancing the company’s SaaS ambitions, as well as placing a strong emphasis on customer and employee experience. As mentioned above, this is not Angove’s first rodeo in moving a company to the cloud, and his experience at Infor over the years will likely be invaluable. He says:
That’s really the philosophy: how do we develop and accelerate all the roadmaps? Things will take a year to two years, let’s do them faster. So that’s what I spent the last four weeks going through. What is the vision? How can we do things faster? How can we get faster in the cloud?
For the past few years, Blue Yonder has been running a cloud migration program, called Journey to the Cloud. However, Angove says it’s largely about getting customers to a specific version and keeping them on the same code base, while moving them to the cloud. His priority now is moving those customers to the Luminate platform, which is multi-tenant, native SaaS.
Luminate, Blue Yonder’s AI and ML platform that powers many of its modern solutions, is central to Blue Yonder’s cloud ambitions. It’s the platform’s data capabilities, enabled by its integration with Snowflake, that particularly impressed Angove. He says:
What Blue Yonder did was build the Luminate platform, with the ability to use common components built into a modern architecture, running on top of Azure and Snowflake.
Snowflake’s decision was something that surprised me. If you think about supply chains, a lot of what you do is coordinate the flow of inventory across multiple stakeholders in a supply chain. And you usually have to share information for that to happen.
We’ve had all kinds of things like EDI and collaborative planning and all these supplier portals – things that have grown to facilitate all of that. And the elegant thing about Snowflake is that all that data is in a cloud data platform.
They have a phrase that I really like, which is, you know, supply chain collaboration is just a query. This is a revolutionary change of thinking. So I think all the architectural work that went into Luminate, Azure and Snowflake allows us to dramatically rethink the way some supply chain functions run.
So now we’re accelerating all the roadmaps so we can build the complete full suite on top of Luminate as native SaaS, with all the differences within it.
Another area where Blue Yonder is heavily investing is in its commercial capabilities, made possible by its acquisition of SaaS company Yantriks in July 2020. Angove said that while Blue Yonder is known for its supply chain , its warehouse and transportation management, Yantriks provides an opportunity to build a brand around order management and also omni-channel fulfillment. He says:
It’s an incredibly differentiated offering, built on a modern multi-tenant SaaS architecture. It has a very elegant microservices architecture, so you don’t have to rip and replace your entire OMS. You can say, ‘I just need a part’ and it plugs in. That’s a tremendous opportunity. So we’re doubling and tripling and quadruple down there.
The supply chain is critical
Since joining Blue Yonder, Angove has unsurprisingly spent time talking to customers to try and understand what their needs are and what issues they face regarding their future supply chain. He said supply chain management should be seen as “part of our national infrastructure” because when it goes down, businesses and the economy grind to a halt. Angove says:
That’s the level and quality of service and stability you need. And running a supply chain in the cloud is completely different, it’s very, very hard to do. And I think that’s why you’ve never really seen anything pop up in that space.
But this is a hyper growth SaaS company and we are accelerating. I’ve always believed in putting products right and if you get the product right, everything else will take care of itself.
Angove added that most of the conversations he has with customers are not with technology leaders, but with the CEOs themselves – which shows how important these investments are to organizations. He says:
In my previous companies, the relationship was usually with the CIO. All my outreach here is to the CEOs and they all respond because we are very mission critical in what they do.
They want to make sure they have a relationship with the CEO so they can get the true highest quality service availability and reliability in the SaaS services we provide. And anything we do with our supply chain applications actually influences their overall supply chain business strategy.
Your business strategy is not what you do in HR, right? When you think about the supply chain, it changes how you think about your overall business strategy. And the thing about Blue Yonder is that this company has the brand authority to talk about supply chain best practices and trends, because of the company’s heritage and know-how.
So the conversations have been great, it’s not about speeds and feeds and all that, they’re about where the supply chain is going, especially in a world where you have all the supply disruptions this chain.
I take it
Much of what Angove is talking about here seems very reminiscent of what he helped achieve at Infor. And that’s not a bad thing – Infor’s strategy to bring customers to the cloud has been solid and very successful. Angove talked about building Blue Yonder’s industry clouds, focusing on the Luminate platform, improving the employee and customer experience, as well as moving beyond the mid market. I’ve known Angove and some of the team he brought to Blue Yonder for several years – it’s a team with a lot of experience and the ability to execute a vision. We’ll be keeping a close eye on Blue Yonder revealing more in the coming months.
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