Oracle Acquires LogFire

Oracle said this week it has acquired LogFire, an Atlanta-based provider of Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud-based, Warehouse Management Systems in an effort to complement its Oracle Supply Chain Management Cloud suite.

LogFire was established in 2007 and customers from the retail, consumer goods, third-party logistics and e-commerce sectors use LogFire's solutions to fill more than 100 million global orders annually.

Financial terms of the deal were not made publicly available. Oracle said that LogFire's management team and employees will join the Oracle SCM Cloud team, adding that the combination will provide comprehensive cloud-based solutions to modernize supply chain operations. And it added that Oracle is committed to protecting and enhancing customer investments in LogFire solutions, and ffter the close of the transaction, Oracle said it plans to continue to invest in Supply Chain Management Cloud, with the expectation that this will include more functionality and capabilities at a quicker pace, coupled with LogFire customers benefiting from better integration and alignment with Oracle's other product offerings.

In a letter to customers and partners, Rick Jewell, Senior Vice President, Oracle SCM Applications Development, noted that LogFire's built-for-the-cloud solution provides an integrated warehouse, inventory, and workforce management platform that easily scales with increased volume and complexity.

“Supply chain organizations are under enormous pressure to capitalize on evolving business trends such as omni-channel fulfillment, integrated logistics and dynamic sourcing, while simultaneously increasing efficiency and reducing costs,” wrote Jewell. “To meet these challenges, Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud offers a broad suite of innovative applications that enables organizations to modernize their supply chain processes. The addition of LogFire will complement the logistics functionality of the Oracle SCM Cloud by adding cloud-based warehouse management capabilities. The LogFire team brings significant knowledge and capabilities to Oracle that will extend the value Oracle SCM Cloud already brings to our customers and partners.”

Diego Pantoja-Navajas, LogFire, Founder, Chairman, CEO, wrote in a posting on the LogFire Website yesterday that LogFire is “very humbled and excited about this great event,” adding that Oracle will leverage its expertise in the cloud-based warehouse management space while LogFire integrates into Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud's broad suite of innovative applications that enables supply chain organizations to modernize their supply chain processes.

LogFire's top executive added that for the last nine years LogFire has been on the forefront of changing the fulfillment and distribution industry.

“We were born with great passion for the supply chain industry that was multi-cultured, multi-tenant and multi-channel. Customer centricity was, and has always been foremost,” he said. “The years since 2007 have seen technology change the world. There was the emergence of mobile phones, Facebook, YouTube and the new working generation. On the Supply Chain front we started discussing multi-channel and new consumer buying behaviors around ecommerce. Cloud solutions started to encroach on traditional on-premises supply chain solutions as companies looked to squeeze even more costs out of the fulfillment supply chain. In the midst of it all, LogFire had the opportunity to build a new kind of warehouse management solution for The New Fulfillment Economy.”

Steve Banker, Vice President, Supply Chain Management, for ARC Advisory Group, said that this deal was not surprising, considering that financial analysts are bullish on SaaS revenues, and Oracle is eager to make Wall Street happy. And he added that at Oracle's supply chain conference last year – Modern Supply Chain Experience – Logfire was featured to an unusual degree, but Oracle was mum when asked whether or not a plan was intact for it to acquire LogFire contingent on LogFire hitting certain growth targets.

“As far as shipper benefits, right now Logfire is integrated to their SCM cloud product,” said Banker. “But I would expect that Oracle would seriously look at going beyond certified integration to a seamless operation across TMS and WMS. This could be achieved by getting to a common master data model and being able to run both products on the same database. I would also expect that Oracle will accelerate the functional enrichment of the Logfire product. Their existing WMS is very functionally rich, perhaps even richer than some of their key competitors for supporting the factory warehouse. So Oracle already knows what they need to do to make a product that is feature/function competitive with Manhattan and JDA.”

In August 2015, LogFire said that it has successfully integrated its WMS with Oracle Transportation Management, which it said formed the industry's first 100 percent cloud-based supply chain execution convergence solution, which is defined by Gartner as the need for supply chain organizations to better orchestrate and synchronize execution processes across functional domains.

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