Supply chain management software company Tecsys Inc. has
created a new executive role of chief platform officer
in an effort to promote the development of cloud-based software architecture and to unite its growing menu of products accumulated through a series of recent acquisitions, the firm said today.
The "overarching" role will steer the technology platform that underpins the company's growing software-as-a-service (SaaS) operations while empowering teams both inside and outside of Tecsys to build the next generation of solutions to meet increasingly complex supply chain challenges, the company said.
Montreal-based Tecsys named technology veteran Steven Berkovitz to the chief platform officer position, pointing to his years of experience working in technology and building software for the commerce, retail, supply chain, accounting, and education industries.The appointment also continues the integration between Tecsys and Order Dynamics, the distributed order management (DOM) software vendor it acquired eight months ago, where Berkovitz had been co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO).
By stepping into his new role, Berkovitz said he will take on the mission of "platform modernization" in response to Tecsys' recent history of completing a number of acquisitions over the years, resulting in a portfolio that has grown to include products built on different technologies and serving different markets and verticals, he said.
"We're seeing the chief platform officer role crop up across the industry. Sometimes it is complimentary to the chief technology officer and/or chief product officer roles while other times it is all encompassing of the two," Berkovitz said in an email. "Generally speaking, I think it reflects the response to customer demands for a true platform they can build on and not just individual products that are deployed to certain users in the organization."
While most end users will interact with Tecsys' software through streamlined apps and user interfaces, there is also a core group of more technical customers who need to build complete solutions with the firm's products, Berkovitz said. Those users need to manage foundational supply chain services—such as inventory, orders, demand planning, and routing—without worrying about the technical and operational details.
Cloud technology is the way to solve those riddles, he said, since that approach has become fundamental to the next generation of supply chain solutions for three main reasons: scale, global reach, and security & privacy.
