For the second straight year, Enterra Solutions®, LLC, has been selected as one of 25 companies featured in the Editors’ Pick section of Consumer Goods Technology (CGT) Readers’ Choice Issue. This annual benchmark issue draws on feedback from consumer goods executives to rank service and solution providers in multiple supply chain categories and has an omnibus category entitled “Editors’ Picks” for “companies [that] do not fit snugly into any one group due to their size or focus.” The Editors’ Pick section recognizes companies “that are poised to make a substantial impact on the consumer good market with innovative yet necessary tools.”

Enterra® was selected by CGT for it continued work in the supply chain optimization sector. This year Enterra was recognized for its Pre-Inventory Prediction (PIP) Module, which it developed with Conair Corporation. “After last year’s recognition, Enterra Solutions remained on our scope for its continued efforts to create innovative solutions for pressing supply chain challenges,” noted Alliston Ackerman, Editor of CGT. “Enterra continues to fill a need in the enterprise software market and it deserves greater attention. We look forward to following Enterra Solutions in its future endeavors.” The article announcing Enterra’s recognition notes that the PIP module “provides real-time shipping visibility, computes the perturbative effects of transit delays on retailer orders, and allows for dynamic pre-inventory allocations of in-transit inventories, while also achieving available-to-promise functionality.”

According to Jon Harding, Conair’s Global Chief Information Officer, “The PIP Module will enable Conair to increase its supply-side visibility and to calculate potential effects of shipping delays on customers.” He also states, “This solution from Enterra allows us to have much greater visibility into our supply chain and also gives us the ability to dynamically allocate inventories to mitigate the effects of delays on customers. The results will be increased customer satisfaction while reducing operating costs and avoiding potential compliance chargebacks.”

Obviously, we are extremely honored to receive this recognition for a second straight year. Conair has been and continues to be a great co-development partner. In 2012, we will continue to expand the functionality for PIP and deliver a comprehensive new module for supply chain network visibility and coordination. This new module will be entitled Global Network Synchronization and will blend our PIP, Compliance and Holistic Planning capabilities into a new leading edge solution for consumer products, manufacturing, and retail industries.

Additionally, Enterra is bringing to market a suite of leading market sensing and execution capabilities for Predictive Analytics and Insights on Downstream Market Data and Demand Generation. Enterra also offers a Master Data Intelligence Solution that complements traditional Master Data Management systems by making them more efficient and effective.

Other companies selected as Editor’s Picks included:

• 1SYNC — 1SYNC specializes in Product Data Management and Data Synchronization.
•  Acxiom — Acxiom offers marketing services and technology that helps global retail and CPG brands successfully manage audiences, personalize consumer experiences and create profitable customer relationships.
•  AFS Technologies — AFS Technologies provides profit maximizing software solutions for manufacturers in the CPG industry.
•  Amber Road (Formerly Management Dynamics, Inc.) — Amber Road is a provider of on-demand Global Trade Management (GTM) solutions. By helping organizations to comply with country-specific trade regulations, as well as plan, execute and track global shipments, Amber Road enables goods to flow unimpeded across international borders in the most efficient, compliant and profitable way.
•  Apacheta Corporation — Apacheta provides CPG companies with flexible mobile applications for route sales/direct store delivery, merchandising, field service, and transportation to streamline operations.
•  Appirio — Appirio provides services and technology that help companies adopt, extend and connect cloud computing platforms, helping them to become more agile, efficient and capitalize on new mobile and social trends.
•  BT — BT’s CPG vertical business offers industry-specific services based on a core portfolio encompassing global networking, security collaboration, data center, contact center and mobility. This enables CPG multinationals to focus on globalization, new product development and operational efficiency.
•  buzz solutions — buzz solutions retail buzz product for CPG companies is a superior retail execution/sales force automation solution on force.com.
•  Capgemini — Capgemini is a global provider of consulting, technology and outsourcing services that helps consumer products and retail companies achieve demand-driven enterprise market leadership.
•  Context Optional — Context Optional is a provider of social marketing management solutions for global brands.
•  Datalliance — Datalliance offers a software-as-a-Service Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) platform that helps CG manufacturers cost-effectively deploy and grow their VMI programs.
•  Digital Tempus — Digital Tempus provides process expertise, strategic insight and talent development to help global companies improve strategic and operational planning capabilities.
•  E2open, Inc. — E2open delivers strategic, cloud-based solutions to enable brand owners and manufacturers to manage end-to-end supply chain processes and to respond intelligently to continuous change in supply, demand and products.
•  Flowfinity Wireless Inc. — Flowfinity provides software and services for building enterprise mobile apps without programming.
•  Genpact — Genpact helps CG companies worldwide achieve business process excellence and make smarter business decisions through customer management, supply chain, analytics and research, and finance and accounting services.
•  inno360, Inc. — inno360 offers a SaaS Enterprise Innovation Management Platform featuring a global connection engine to find research, landscape, IP, literature, people, extracts experts, and authors.
•  Inspirage LLC — Inspirage is a full service global consulting firm specializing in the implementation of systems and processes using Oracle Value Chain Planning applications, including Oracle Demantra Demand Management.
•  IronBridge Software — Ironbridge Software provides cost-effective business intelligence solutions to the CPG industry. It combines web-based reporting products with Demand Signal Repository expertise to deliver a competitive advantage for the manufacturer, broker and retailer.
•  LumiData — LumiData’s SOLYS software provides a 360-degree perspective of demand for retail sales teams and executives.
•  Relational Solutions, Inc. — Relational Solutions specializes in cleansing, validation and integration of point-of-sale (POS) data with internal and syndicated data.
•  Selerant — Selerant’s offerings include DevEX, a web-based Product Lifecycle Management software; Regulatory Scientific Affairs services; and implementation, PLM, NPDI consulting services.
•  StayinFront — StayinFront offers consumer goods CRM solutions for CPG manufacturers and distributors, supporting account selling, retail execution and direct store delivery activities.
•  Telerx — Telerx builds and protects the world’s most prestigious brands by providing world-class customer care that transforms the customer experience. Telerx’s customized approach to traditional and emerging contact channels fosters loyalty and generates actionable insights.
•  ThinkVine — ThinkVine’s marketing optimization software enables B2C marketers to maximize ROI across all marketing investments by simulating how consumers respond to different marketing plans in order to provide better forward-looking guidance than traditional marketing mix.

For companies like Enterra Solutions, who aren’t yet well known, recognition by well-respected publications and organizations is extremely important. I’m sure the CEOs of the companies listed above join me in thanking CGT for singling our companies out. Finding innovative but low-profile companies that are doing great things isn’t easy. Derrick Harris of GigaOM discovered five “low profile” Big Data that he believes deserve more recognition; but, as one of his readers, Steve Ardire, commented, “I can list 3 or 4 more low-profile startups that could change the face of big data right off top of my head and there’s probably another 25 since this space is sizzling red hot !” [“5 low-profile startups that could change the face of big data,” 28 January 2012] I’d like to think that Enterra Solutions is one of those companies. The five companies singled out by Harris include:

1. BloomReach

“The stealth-mode BloomReach is taking a very targeted, very hands-free approach to big data for its customers. It’s offering a SaaS-based product that job listings say is for ‘helping leading online businesses uncover the highest quality, most relevant content sought by their consumers, when and where they want it.’ Founded by a team with roots at Google, Cisco, Facebook and Yahoo, among other companies, BloomReach has, according to one estimate, about 160 customers — all of them among the top 10,000 websites, and most of them in the retail space. Among its core technologies and methods are Hadoop, Lucene, Monte Carlo simulations and large-scale image processing.

2. Continuuity

“Continuuity, the just-launched stealth-mode startup by former Yahoo VP and chief cloud architect Todd Papaioannou, wants to make it easier to build applications that can leverage both cloud computing and big data technologies. As Papaioannou told me recently, most developers shouldn’t have to go through what Yahoo, Facebook and others did in order to write large-scale, data-driven applications. He also said ‘the data fabric is the next middleware’ and noted that the company name is a play on ‘continuum.’ You figure out what it’s up to.

3. Odiago

“Odiago is the brainchild of Hadoop and analytics experts Christophe Bisciglia and Aaron Kimball, and aims to improve the state of web analytics. Its first product, Wibidata, which is in private beta, lets websites better analyze their user data to build more-targeted features. It’s built atop Hadoop and HBase, but also plugs into companies’ existing data-management and BI tools. Current customers include Wikipedia, RichRelevance, FoneDoktor and Atlassian (with whom it shares office space).

4. Platfora

“Platfora, which launched in September with $5.7 million in funding, wants to make big data analytics accessible to the masses. Founder and CEO Ben Werther, formerly of Greenplum and NoSQL startup DataStax, told me when Platfora launched that its intuitive, visually stunning interface will make Hadoop-based analytics so easy even a history major could use it. Platfora’s product isn’t available yet, but the company is currently hiring, with an emphasis on frontend and user-experience skills.

5. SkyTree

“Skytree is probably the stealthiest of the group, but it’s also is one of the more ambitious — because it’s trying to bring high-performance machine learning to mainstream companies. Machine learning is an impressive technique in which the system itself gets smarter as it digests more data, but it usually doesn’t find its way out of research environments or cutting-edge analytics teams. Skytree is putting together an impressive team, including co-founder Alexander Gray, who also teaches machine learning at Georgia Tech and spent six years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The company will officially launch later this quarter.”

I agree with Steve Ardire that the Big Data sector is red hot. Some people, however, believe that there is more smoke than fire. This is natural whenever the “next big thing” is introduced. I’ll comment more this aspect of Big Data (i.e., its over-hype) in a future post.