Fortunately, help is here in the form of the order management system (OMS). A modern OMS brings together all parts of customer orders across all channels, brands and geographies. It’s the software platform that orchestrates all of retail’s many moving parts so that they work in harmony. A must-have for today’s retailer, the OMS is the “omni” in omnichannel.
As the hub of retail activity, today’s order management
systems must be able to adjust to constantly changing market conditions and consumer demand. This new world of connected commerce requires an OMS solution that is extremely agile, scalable and extensible.
Years ago, Manhattan Associates, a leading provider of omnichannel and supply chain solutions, identified these trends and set about rebuilding its full suite of omnichannel solutions, including its market-leading OMS. For the company to deliver this vision, it first needed to modernize its application environment. It knew lifting and shifting a monolithic architecture to the cloud wouldn’t deliver the level of agility that it and its end customers would need.
Manhattan decided that a complete shift to a cloud-native design was the only way to achieve the agility, flexibility and speed required. The company set out to re-architect its omnichannel solutions to take full advantage of all the benefits of the cloud platform underneath. It started by establishing some critical architectural principles to serve as its North Star for cloud-native application design:
To deliver on these imperatives, Manhattan Associates teamed with Google Cloud, and the two industry leaders worked together to take full advantage of the powerful cloud platform. They were able to achieve new levels of agility, scalability
and resiliency with the Google Kubernetes Engine.
The company also improved ease of use and openness by leveraging the Cloud SQL open-source software to run managed MySQL databases.
Lastly, Manhattan was able to maintain full visibility and control of customer environments with Google Cloud’s detailed monitoring and logging functionality.
The company also required an open and extensible ecosystem so that its customers and partners could easily build and integrate additional capabilities.
Manhattan Associates sought to adopt a microservices-based, cloud-native approach so it could deliver new functionality faster.
The company needed the flexibility to scale performance and resources based on its end customers’ needs.
Finally, Manhattan Associates required the ability to leverage open-source technologies for portability and to avoid vendor lock-in. In addition, it required detailed logging and monitoring tools to maintain control over costs.
The first fruit of this effort is Manhattan Active® Omni, the first truly cloud-native, unified commerce platform built entirely from microservices. It was purposefully designed for the way consumers shop today and is adaptable to tomorrow’s inevitable market shifts. From order management to point of sale, Manhattan Active Omni is the most technologically and operationally advanced commerce platform ever created. Since its launch in 2017, Manhattan Active Omni has been battle-tested with many of the world’s top retailers.
The most recent indication of Manhattan Active Omni’s preeminence comes from independent research firm Forrester, which has placed the product alone in the “Leaders” space in its prestigious report, The Forrester Wave™: Order Management Systems, Q2 2021.
“Manhattan leads with a robust, well-connected solution,” Forrester stated in its report, calling Manhattan a “power player in the OMS category” and noting that its solution is “very strong in scalability.”
“Manhattan is a best fit for well-resourced enterprises with complex needs that require a mature solution,” Forrester continued in its evaluation of the Atlanta-based company’s OMS and those of six other top providers.
The Forrester Wave™ is copyrighted by Forrester Research, Inc. Forrester and Forrester Wave are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. The Forrester Wave is a graphical representation of Forrester's call on a market and is plotted using a detailed spreadsheet with exposed scores, weightings, and comments. Forrester does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in the Forrester Wave. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change.