Market research firm Gartner is reporting that supply chain management (SCM) software is on track to generate $10 billion in revenue in 2014. That’s a 12.2 percent increase from 2013; the market hasn’t grown that quickly since 2011. Only 16 percent of that revenue will come from enterprises adopting SCM software for the first time.
Unlike many other kinds of enterprise software, most SCM deployments reside on-premise rather than in the cloud. Chad Eschinger, research vice president at Gartner, explained, “Within supply chains, a lot of the existing footprint has been on-premise?there is a lot of sensitive information that needs to be leveraged by supply chain planners trying to do what-if scenarios to marketing campaigns for instance,” Eschinger said. “A lot of organizations might be reluctant to have that information mingling out there with others.” He added that cloud computing versions of SCM generally don’t offer the same functionality as on-premise versions.