TrueCommerce Buys Datalliance for VMI

TrueCommerce, Cranberry, PA, a global provider of trading partner connection and integration solutions, has acquired Datalliance, Cincinnati, a provider of vendor managed inventory (VMI) technology and services that has seen significant adoption among electrical manufacturers and distributors over the past several years.

TrueCommerce, a $90 million software company operating in the U.S. and Europe, said the addition of Datalliance complements its portfolio of offerings with a strategic technology service that extends its commerce network into the collaborative replenishment, inventory management and demand forecasting markets.

“Our global growth strategy is founded on increasing the breadth and depth of the services that we offer to our commerce network community,” said Mike Cornell, CEO of TrueCommerce. “The addition of industry leader Datalliance and their collaborative replenishment, inventory management and demand forecasting capabilities increases the value that we add for our customers, allows us access to markets that we previously didn’t have and enhances our competitive position.”

The addition of Datalliance comes in the midst of a repositioning of TrueCommerce. The core of the company has focused on electronic data interchange (EDI) networks. In August TrueCommerce divested some supply chain businesses that offered warehouse management systems and related software as part of a move to focus on building trading partner commerce platforms with value added services and applications clustered around its core EDI offerings.

“Our goal is to tie together the business community across a variety of markets, electrical wholesale being one of them, and provide them with a rich set of applications so they can take advantage of the connectivity we provide,” Ross Elliott, president and chief strategy officer of TrueCommerce, told Electrical Marketing. “Datalliance is the most recent of those value-added applications and services.”

(Elliott will be familiar to some in the electrical industry from his earlier role as a co-founder of NxTrend, the distribution ERP system provider acquired in 2004 by what is now Infor.)

Datalliance’s expertise in offering VMI as a cloud-based platform and having successfully implemented VMI for hundreds of customers across multiple industries, geographies and business sizes, will open doors in markets such as electrical and industrial where TrueCommerce hopes to grow.

Datalliance VMI will become part of the package of services offered around the core cloud-based EDI platform. TrueCommerce already has built back-end connectivity to 20 or more ERP systems enabling it to provide seamless connectivity for distribution.