A stealthy operator is starting to catch the eye.

I enjoyed my second biannual catch up with GXS this week. I have a soft spot for it because its Orlando event was the first I attended as an official technology market analyst, back in 2001. I had actually been a technology market analyst for some time before that because I'd been covering process automation technology since 1997 but, much like real life, I'd never actually had a conversation with anyone that was covering technology outside of the plant floor.

Anyway, GXS had been busy—this much I knew—and, as Dale reported earlier this year, it has spent a considerable amount of time over the last 5 or so years doing some distinctly unglamorous supply chain automation stuff, enabling trading partners to match their information exchanging capabilities to their logistics capabilities.

I think GXS may find itself becoming a victim of its own quiet, relative success in the not too distant future.

In the same way that BT is obliged to allow local loop access to third party service providers, GXS has spent a long time establishing its trading network infrastructure and is now reporting increasing forays into its market by newer, smaller players. It even reports a new wave of interest in EDI (electronic data interchange), by companies trying to sell it, and analysts who have never heard of it. Like any slightly dominant player in a market, it now has to sustain its position in an increasingly competitive environment.

All this obviously means its been doing something right. It's not standing still either, and is exploring several new areas, both aimed at creating additional service revenue—one from a recent acquisition (UDEX) around data quality services for product information/attributes, and the other aimed at turning the actual trading information passed between partners into business opportunities for financial services organisations (e.g. those offering trade credit)—the notion of 'looking into the pipe' is a new one, but is starting to catch on.

One of the areas that GXS and its acquired capabilities are active in is the 3 letter acronym—heavy product information management (PIM)—arena, which is in turn related to MDM (master data management) and global data synchronisation (GDS)—I won't go on—essentially we are talking about manufacturers, distributors and buyers being able to match their goods to increasingly complex data regarding the product's origins, attributes and so on—yet while I was listening to GXS's activities here what I was actually hearing was 'assets, relationships, storage, retrieval, impacts of changes'… and so on.

Yes, product data management is worlds apart from IT asset and service management in terms of topic and focus but, perhaps, not so far apart when you consider that the underlying need is to capture and understand the relationship of multiple items to each other, especially when things keep changing.

It's a high level relationship/similarity for sure, but when you are kicking off something as potentially laborious as a CMDB project for the first time, you should seek all the help you can get.