Sanjiv Sidhu, founder and chairman of o9 Solutions (and co-founder of i2 Technologies), offers his view of how supply-chain I.T. has changed over the past 15 years, and what businesses need to do now in order to face the growing uncertainty that's attached to global supply-chain management.

Having undergone a raft of acquisitions and name changes over the years, the pharmaceutical giant formerly known as Actavis scraps its legacy manual processes and embraces formal demand-planning and advanced-scheduling technology.

Oh, sure, go on and do it by yourself. Just try to run the company without any help. Treat suppliers like you don't need them. Go on! If there's a recipe for disaster, that's probably it: acting like you don't need anybody else's cooperation, input or ideas. The reality is quite a bit different though, isn't it? No company, no supply chain, exists in a vacuum. We do rely on each other, because no one of us can do it all, successfully, by ourselves. We need partners. Ah, but which partners – which ones are right for you?

JDA Software Group Inc. has developed version 9.0 of its application for integrating digital and physical retail supply chains.