Mr. Singh: Amitive was founded in early 2002 by Mitsui, a large Japanese company with about 200 business units that offers supply chain outsourcing and services for manufacturing companies. The company was looking for a supply chain solution with which to manage customer communities. Mitsui built a solution in house and a few years later decided to spin it off as an independent company, now called Amitive. In August 2006, the Silicon Valley VCs, CMEA Ventures and Logispring, acquired Amitive and have since invested 16 million. I came onboard last year to run the company and over the last 12 months, we have been building the third generation of our product, which was released on October 1, 2008. In terms of what Amitive offers, we deliver a community-based supply chain management solution for brand owners that outsource manufacturing. What does that mean? Several companies have chosen to outsource their manufacturing. Good examples are companies like Apple, Nike and Levis. These great companies used to be manufacturers at one time and have now chosen to outsource that function. They source products from Asia Pacific or other parts of the world, but they are not actually managing the manufacturing process. Now, if you look at current supply chain offerings whether from SAP, I2 or Oracle they all have their roots in manufacturing-centric supply chains. Starting with the factory, they optimized constraints such as plant schedules, machine schedules, labor schedules, sequencing of production and so on. Then they added warehouses and subsequently, suppliers and customers. They essentially grew outward from a core of manufacturing. Whereas if you look at the companies we are targeting, brand owners that outsource manufacturing, their objective has shifted from asset utilization which is a key objective of manufacturing to product velocity. That means moving product to their supply chains as efficiently as possible and leaving asset utilization to the suppliers. Amitive is focusing on these brand owners. They need to address a different problem with a new set of supply chain capabilities. Today, most of these companies either use Excel or they have customized or modified versions of existing supply chain management software, which is still not solving the problem.
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