PERSPECTIVE

Journey to the Cloud

A Candid Conversation About the Value of
Deploying Technology in the Cloud

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.

PERSPECTIVE

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.

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.

Richard Heinrich: Ive been with True

Religion Brand Jeans
for about two years. To me, its a rela
tively 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 Californ
ia. We have about
140 stores right now. We have full-pric
e stores, outlet stores
and also a third channel, which is our
e-commerce business.

S.A. for 17 years

Fabrice Sasmayoux: Ive been working for Total
nsible for the
respo
nt,
rtme
depa
gy
now, and work in the strate
d number five
ranke
is
Total
ms.
syste
ation
service station inform
tries, from
in the oil and gas industry. We operate in 130 coun
branch is
My
.
mers
custo
extracting the raw product to the final
operate
We
ess.
busin
the
of
part
n
in what we call the distributio
in Africa
one
er
numb
are
we
and
tries,
coun
65
s
15,000 sites acros
and Western Europe.

PERSPECTIVE

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,

PERSPECTIVE

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.