In the same year that Francisco Partners LP declared "We carried out a market check with JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) and although the valuations we received were reasonable, we did not think they were compelling for us to sell GXS at this moment," roughly that same amount was enough for OpenText to acquire the company. It could be that Francisco Partners simply tired of the slow pace of recovering its investment or that its own investors didn't see the light at the end of the tunnel. Read more...

It’s an old topic - EDI being dead. And the reality is that at the current rate of use and adoption, EDI and its similar counterparts are not likely to disappear… possibly ever. But the importance of EDI as a singular and only answer to digital supply chain management is diminishing in importance. Read more...

Last week we published a list of trading partners that might be affected by the discontinuation of GXS’ contract with LorenData / ECGrid. After receiving a few comments from knowledgeable people in the business that the list may be inaccurate, we removed the document. Even so, we believe that there is likely some number of trading partners that will be left in the lurch when the connection they have been using for a decade stops working some time in 2014. Also later last week I had the opportunity to talk with Steve Scala, GXS’ senior vp of strategy and development. Here’s a recap of our conversation and my own observations.

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Want to answer the age-old (well, maybe not age-old… perhaps just decades-old) question of where in the organization does EDI belong?  Try BOTS… the open-source EDI solution.  Here’s my take on it. Read more...