It's been an exciting couple of weeks at E2open, to say the least. We're always looking for new ways to address the challenges your business is facing, which is what inspired our big announcement from last month: our acquisition of SERUS Corporation. This is big news, as the combined SERUS and E2open technologies will offer the broadest end-to-end view of your supply chain of any product on the market today.

At E2open, we know that your business moves fast and that your product life cycles and new product introductions (NPI) are on a more accelerated track than ever before. Blink and you could miss the latest generation of a product. On a daily basis, you're constantly faced with the question, "Is my supply chain fast enough to keep up with my customers?" This kind of lightning-quick environment naturally creates a demand for increased visibility across manufacturing-driven industries as they seek better ways to collaborate and manage process intellectual property (IP), NPI, and engineering change orders (ECOs).

As I see it, the difference between winning and losing in today's hyper-competitive environment is NPI, especially in the high tech industry, where supply chains move the fastest and the stakes are particularly high. If you're trying to grow your company, new products, expansion into new markets with new product features, and innovation are critical capabilities to be competitive. However, introducing new products frequently means new equipment, and systems that can quickly adapt to changes, such as determining how rapidly a new set of chips for a new product could be made, are key.

Merging SERUS' technology, which already has proven success with some of today's technology leaders like Nvidia, with the E2open Business Network improves visibility, and accelerates the flow of information for faster NPI and responsiveness to customers. Now, you're armed with the critical knowledge you need to make better decisions with greater flexibility with earlier notification of any potential disruptions that could be lurking upstream.

Together, these two powerful technologies offer the speed, quality and agility that your supply chain needs to stay squarely ahead of the competition, as you reap the rewards of the cost savings from your supply chain running at optimal efficiency and gain new revenue from accelerated NPI. As the number of semiconductor-based products entering the market is exploding, the implications of this technology are far-reaching, touching on a number of industries, such as medical devices, aerospace and defense, automotive, industrial equipment and telecommunications.

As you can tell, I'm excited about this new chapter for E2open and what this means for cloud-based technologies in general. In the short period since we've announced this news, the marketplace has shown a similar level of enthusiasm, which I thought you'd find interesting:

 "From this author's perspective, the combination of SERUS and E2open has the potential to provide the broadest set of capabilities for business networks in the market today."

- Bob Ferrari in Supply Chain Matters

"SERUS' current customers include AMD, Cypress, Flextronics, IDT, Juniper, Nvidia, Oracle, and Qualcomm/Atheros. E2open's offering will be the one to match and beat in the high-tech supply chain network visibility space."

- PJ Jakovljevic in TEC

"… I view this as another example of how the combination of B2B networks with software-as-a-service applications opens the door to new opportunities for supply chain innovation."

- Adrian Gonzalez in Talking Logistics

"Serus' offerings include manufacturing visibility (including work-in-process movements, yield status and nonconformance management), contract compliance and design for manufacturing (DFM). These will broaden E2open's business network further upstream into contract manufacturing and semiconductor production, while expanding its supply chain visibility capabilities deeper into product design and production."

- Gartner First Look

Now that you've heard the buzz about this latest news from E2open, I'm eager to hear your thoughts. How will this extended visibility help you and your NPI processes?

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