Analyst Insight: Most supply chain management organizations struggle with functional and application silos that make orchestrating and synchronizing business processes across their organization near impossible. Supply chain execution convergence is an emerging Gartner concept where SCE functional silos are broken down and business processes span, optimize and synchronize across traditional functional domains. - Dwight Klappich, vice president, Gartner Inc.

Financial-Supply Chain convergence requires that supply chain personnel and financial personnel start working more closely.

Analyst Insight: For as long as we can remember, product lifecycle management technology has evolved in an incremental way, absorbing and exploiting new technologies as they've come along and steadily gaining in capability to meet the challenges of multi-organisation product development efforts and supply chains. Currently, the PLM solutions industry is being subjected to a looming confluence of pressures that represents both a major challenge to established approaches and a substantial opportunity for harnessing new technologies to drive further benefit. - Tony Christian, principal analyst, Cambashi

Analyst Insight: In recent years, Software as a Service and hosted solutions have made some significant in-roads in the supply chain application space, but their success has been somewhat limited. Continuing IT budget and resource constraints are causing many firms to take a serious look at on-demand supply chain applications. And software vendors have responded by increasing the number and variety of services provided. This mixture is expanding the horizon of on-demand supply chain IT solutions. - Tom Singer, principal, Tompkins International

The cloud offers the potential not only to transform how supply chain organizations procure IT capabilities but also to fundamentally change how they manage business processes.