Ram Venkataraman: 0:03

Forecasting web demand is more complicated than typical supply chain forecasting, which is more historical demand base, right? So you might do a, a great promotion depending on the brand. There might be an Instagram influencer who may say something that creates a mad rush onto a site. How do you predict that and how do you predict demand, and how do you predict inventory to be available at the right location so you don't have stockouts.

Tom Raftery: 0:29

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the Digital Supply Chain Podcast, the number one podcast focusing on the digitization of supply chain, and I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Hi everyone, and welcome to one of the final episodes of the Digital Supply Chain Podcast. Not the final one, there's still more to come, but one of the last episodes, and I'll explain why in upcoming episodes. Right now, this is episode number 379 of the Digital Supply Chain Podcast. My name is Tom Raftree, and it's fantastic to have you joining me here today as we dive into the most current and exciting developments in the supply chain world. And now, without further ado, I'd like to introduce my special guest today, Ram. Ram, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Ram Venkataraman: 1:23

Thank you, Tom. Thank you for having me. My name is Ram Vekatraman. I'm the CEO of Kibo Commerce. I've been with the business for about six years or so. Kibo Commerce is a composable commerce platform that delivers a modern solution around e-commerce, order management and subscriptions.

Tom Raftery: 1:41

Okay. And for people who might be unaware, Ram, what's composable mean in this context?

Ram Venkataraman: 1:49

Yeah, great question. As we think about digital transformations, right, I think businesses, whether it's B2C or B2B have a lot of different choices in terms of how they want to go about transforming their businesses. And a lot of them, you know, in the past we would go down this big bang approach of flipping one system and going to another system. The notion of composable, as Gartner calls it and has taken off in the market, is more an agile way of doing it. So we talk about it from a business perspective as as an evolutionary approach of modernizing your platform versus a big bang or revolutionary approach to modernizing the platform. So as we think about composable, you know, Kibo's technologies built in, what's today, a well accepted way of building systems called microservices based. And each of those pieces in Kibo can be deployed independently, and businesses can choose to evolve their architecture and evolve their businesses over a period of time, versus taking a very high risk move of deploying this all in one place. The other huge benefit of a a composable or an agile way of doing things is you don't have to buy everything from one vendor and you have the choice of buying different choices. You might buy a inventory or an order sourcing engine from Kibo, may buy a carton checkout from another platform, a fulfillment system from another vendor, and you can kind of build the solution stack that makes the best sense for you as a business. So lots of different advantages. I'm happy to talk more about it, but think of it in general an agile way, an evolutionary way of deploying systems versus a big bang or revolutionary way of doing things.

Tom Raftery: 3:23

Okay, so kind of a la carte supply chain stack.

Ram Venkataraman: 3:28

Yeah, things are things started in commerce, but they're moving more and more across all of different types of vertical domains. I hear about FinTech going down a big path around this notion of composable. It's not just a commerce concept, it's a commerce, it's an architectural concept in a digital transformation concept used in any other domain. Yes, that's true.

Tom Raftery: 3:48

Great. And Kibo, if I understand correctly, has been around around 20 years. I think. You know, what was the, . genesis story of Kibo, how did it start off, and what problems is Kibo trying to solve?

Ram Venkataraman: 4:03

Kibo was created, the name on the brand was created in 2016 by Vista Equity Partners. They were, they are the one of the largest, if not the largest software investment, private equity firm in the world. And Vista only invests in enterprise B2B software. So, unlike other PE firms that might do a lot of different things, Vista is very focused and niched about 70 odd businesses, give or take in the portfolio today that are in different parts of you know, B2B software, right? You might find things in govtech, you might find things in, you know, monitoring software or other businesses that are there. But Kibo's focus is obviously commerce, and that's the whole thing. So 2016 Vista bought a, bunch of businesses that have all been around since the early two thousands or mid two thousands and different aspects, e-commerce, order management, personalization, so on and so forth. And the idea in 2016, that Vista's investment thesis was, Hey, we wanna create a platform that is really modern, that can really help businesses in, in the $25 million GMB range, all the way up to multi-billion dollar businesses. And how do we build a modern commerce platform? That was the genesis. So I joined the business in 2018 and we've been working through this process and we launched our first version of the software in early 2019, and we've been in the market with this notion of what a, what we call today, a composable commerce platform, right? So the thesis was buy businesses, learn from it, leverage the resources that are there. You know, obviously these businesses had done a lot of different, amazing deployments for customers in different vertical areas, but we wanted to bring this all together in a modern way. So that was kind of the investment thesis and genesis of Kibo.

Tom Raftery: 5:43

And so, what problems are you solving for customers today? You know, what if, if I buy a Kibo, what am I getting?

Ram Venkataraman: 5:52

Yeah, . That's a great way of asking. Depends on what you buy. Depends on what you buy, right? So, you know, we try to solve lots of different use cases, right? But we come from the concept from an order management perspective in a lot of different ways, right? We wanna solve business problems where businesses have, you know, and this is, this is a cliched industry at some level of complexity. Everybody thinks they have a, a level of complexity in their business. So it's not unique to how we think about it, but where we come from is a inventory, bunches of inventory, locations that a customer has. And it could be B2B business or B2C business lots of products, queue use cases, and if the business is really trying to improve customer experience, right? I think that's one of the things, lots of order management platforms come from the point of, some of them come from the financial side, some come from the ERP side, some from the supply chain side. And while we, we, we still think of it that way, we want to really focus on from a customer experience side, how do you build amazing customer experiences using order management data for business? I'll give you a couple of examples, right? So think of it like you are shopping on a website and you wanna know accurate inventory that is there in that specific store location, what bay, what specific SKU that I'm looking for. And you know, if you shop today, you still see a lot of retailers, a lot of types of businesses struggle with that type of information. So inventory visibility is a big problem today. But inventory visibility, some of them may give you great inventory visibility when you're in the, in the, in the PDP page or maybe in the checkout page. But how do you not lose a sale way upfront in the buying journey so that you can buy that product and ensure you can you know, not lose that sale. So that's one example of it. Another example of it is, you know, I wanna segment my inventory in lots of different ways. I wanna sell through maybe a, a marketplace channel a certain way. I want sell in my own online channel, maybe there's, you know, mobile channels I wanna specifically have. So how do you segment those things and still have accurate inventory? So there's lots of use cases like that we have solved for. Happy to talk more about it. But where we come from, from an order management perspective is customer experience. So a customer buying Kibo should think from that perspective. All our products, we kind of engineer it from a product perspective, from the ground up. With that in mind.

Tom Raftery: 8:08

Okay, so you are helping your customers improve their customer's customer experience. So one of the ways you said was by exposing inventory to their customers so that they can see whether or not an individual store has a particular item and where they might find it within that store. It has to be more than that though.

Ram Venkataraman: 8:30

It absolutely is more than that. So let's think about, think about, how about if I have in transit inventory, right? You may have something deep in the supply chain that's come in in three weeks from now. How do you not lose the sale by telling the customer, Hey, this will be available three weeks from now. Right. You have some predictability in your supply chain, but I wanna be able to bring that all the way up to the PDP page of a buying experience in the shop, in a shopping cart to say. I, I will be able to get this product for you in three weeks. I'll deliver it to you. So accurate fulfillment dates, being able to predict it. Look at a specific purchase order that is there in the supply chain. Be again, allocate against it too, right? So how do you not only just promise it, but allocate against it and say, when that inventory shows up, the allocations automatically work, work against those POs. So that's another example. Another great thing we do is, you know, things like soft allocations. So there may be situations where you have such limited quantity of a specific SKU that you wanna, as soon as you drop it into the cart, you wanna allocate that right then and there to say, okay, I can assure you and guarantee you that when you have put it in a cart, they'll make that available. So these are kind of stitching together e-commerce and order management experiences, which typically are very disjointed today. People think of e-comm and OMS as separate things, and that's totally fine. But what we want to do is bring those, bring those order management capabilities and expose that to any e-commerce platform. So it doesn't have to be just Kibo's e-commerce platform. You could leverage any of our competition and still be able to do these wonderful things because we've kind of exposed all this in a API friendly way for other people to connect. Another great example is order sourcing rules, right? So you might have a customer that says, Hey, I don't have it in this location, but I can go pick it up in another location. So how do you bring that inventory availability across all of the network upfront? Or say, if I ship it from this location, it's gonna cost me X amount of dollars or Y from another location. So being able to expose inventory through or sourcing rules, through future POs that may be they're in inventory cycles, soft allocation. These are some examples of what we do in terms of bringing inventory data up into the buying experience across any channel. Same thing could be do done on a CSR channel. Same thing could be done on a mobile channel. Same thing could be done on a point of sale channel. You're trying to save the sale inside a store and doing endless aisle there. Hey, I, I know I don't have it in this store. How can I get it to you from another store?

Tom Raftery: 11:00

Okay. And are your customers primarily B2B or B2C, or are they a kind of a healthy mix?

Ram Venkataraman: 11:07

Yeah, they're a heavy mix in terms of B2C and B2B. A, a large customer of ours, ACE Hardware in the US. We run power their e-commerce experience and their order management experience. They have 5,000 plus store locations. They're a franchise model where each store has their own kind of their own pricing and promotion capability. Some of them even have specific catalog items. We manage all that experience for them. So that is a B2C experience, but they also have a B2B side of the world. So think of a handyman going in there and having a B2B account, a small business. Having specific unique pricing for them in that store so we can combine B2C and B2B on the exact same platform without needing two separate systems that some of our, you know, the market's grown over a period of time, and as business have evolved and vendors have evolved, they've built these things in disjointed ways. You know, having had a chance to kind of reimagine this whole thing as early as 2018, we've had the opportunity to kind of bring this all together, make it easy for businesses to evolve their business model. So a whole a, a brand can go into wholesale, even if you think about, you know, use cases, whether it's a D2C business trying to wholesale to. So we've got a lot of different use cases of customers deploying this, both B2C and B2B on the same platform.

Tom Raftery: 12:19

Okay. And we're all familiar with kind of digital transformations and how they are progressing reasonably well in some industries and less so in others. I gotta think if you're talking to e-commerce companies, they are by definition, well along the pathway of digitization, or am I wrong?

Ram Venkataraman: 12:45

No, I think you'd be surprised. They're all in different phases of the journey. I think they all have, have invested over, over the years in platforms, like what we are talking about here, but the, the actual implementation, making sure the whole infrastructure, all the pieces are actually working together. They're not that many of those who've done, who've, who've done all that exceptionally well. Right. This, I mean, the historical word of omnichannel that we've used in the past, the industry has come up with a lot of different words. Omnichannel, unified commerce. Things of things of different flavors that mean the same thing, but to initially get the same 360 degree view of an order no matter where you place the order, 360 degree view of the customer without having to move data across from system to system. That's still evolving. I think a lot of retailers and other B2B businesses that have different selling channels typically still are in that process of kind of finding the right types of solves for their businesses. So from our perspective, we still see a lot of opportunity today here in 2023, getting into 2024 of businesses who've still not deployed a modern OMS or have still not optimized a modern OMS or a modern e-commerce platform for that matter. Right. So those are other things that we consistently see in our customer base and and prospects who come to us on a regular basis.

Tom Raftery: 14:05

Wow. And we're in the middle of kind of holiday season right now. That's gotta be having huge impacts on your customers, I'd say. Is, is, does that cause particular challenges?

Ram Venkataraman: 14:17

It's actually, it's, I was talking to a, a customer of ours just this morning. It's hard to say when peak season starts these days, it.

Tom Raftery: 14:24

it's getting earlier and earlier

Ram Venkataraman: 14:27

Yeah. Yeah. It seems like it's Halloween in the US and or everywhere in the world, and there's already deals going on, so it's hard as a vendor these days to actually plan that. And I think it was a little more easier a few years ago to say you know, this is when peak season starts. People would form long lines outside what it was, the local store. And you know, there's a mad rush to go get a. I'm dating myself a PS2 or an Xbox when it first came out. Those days doesn't seem to be existing anymore and you know, for us it seems like you have to be ready all the time of the year. So, you know, and generally our philosophy as a business, you know, we built the platform in a certain way, but you definitely prepare an extra vigilant in the last two or three weeks right before you get into peak. But it seems like the peak season, like we talked about, is there, there's no starting period or a fixed starting period. It used to be a huge step function when load would increase. Now it's not a step function anymore.

Tom Raftery: 15:21

And what are the other big challenges that your customers are facing right now?

Ram Venkataraman: 15:27

Yeah, there's a lot of things I think, I think if you think about from a commerce perspective, right? I think everybody's trying to figure out, we talked about the consistency of data across these channels. AI and machine learning is a big thing in terms of leveraging that. How do I automate a lot of these things that needed human beings to do before? If you think about from an e-commerce perspective, search is a huge area where we make a lot of investments in terms of the how do you understand the natural language that a business, that an end customer types up? How do you automatically merchandise using machine learning to be able to say, okay, I see a certain product trending, let me boost that up automatically on a search result. Or, I see top sellers in this case, or there may be maybe testing you're doing to say these types of results are generating better conversion rates. So a notion of using machine learning is a, is a big thing that people are trying to do because I think these business are getting very, very complicated and trying to use machine learning there to optimize these things. A big aspect in terms of what they're trying to do on the search side. Another great example of something that we are working on, a lot of our customers are asking is forecasting. Right? I think especially as the web channel gets bigger and bigger, you know, that's, it's, I don't know, somewhere at this point it's going to pivot in the next few years where web channel has got a, a very sizable part of the business. Forecasting web demand is more complicated than typical supply chain forecasting, which is more historical demand base, right? So you might do a, a great promotion depending on the brand. There might be an Instagram influencer who may say something that creates a mad rush onto a site. How do you predict that and how do you predict demand, and how do you predict inventory to be available at the right location so you don't have stockouts. Right? I think that's a big problem that we see customers struggling with. Again, if you think about it right, is these, these three or four areas, given our kind of core expertise that we operate in. We are trying to really work hard on that. Hey, how do you prevent stockouts? Can we predict and, and tell you, you know, in advance you are gonna have a stock out two weeks out or can we tell you, recommend to you, maybe you wanna move inventory from this location to another location because we see demand on the web channel based on how people are adding to cart, how many people are going to the PDP page, so on and so forth, right? So the understanding the web analytics and being able to influence inventory is a big aspect of what we are working on as part of our roadmap.

Tom Raftery: 18:01

Okay, cool. And you hold regular client summits as well. From what I saw on your, on your website, I think it was Henry Ford who famously said that if he asked his customers what they'd want they'd ask for a faster horse. So how do you balance you know, taking on board customer's feedback in terms of changing product development versus telling customers, actually, this is what you want. You're getting a black car, not a faster horse.

Ram Venkataraman: 19:06

Yeah, it's a and I grew up in product, in technology, so.

Tom Raftery: 19:11

Right.

Ram Venkataraman: 19:11

It's been a lifelong struggle in terms of what the right path is. So this is how we approach it at Kibo, right? So being owned by a private equity firm is one of the, it's a, it's a blessing in many ways. You know, we don't believe in growth at all costs. You know, it's very responsible and profitable growth. So like a lot of the people in industry may have struggled in the past as economic uncertain times. We focus really hard on building the right things for our customers. Right? So one of the things we, we have a very rigid and a very thorough product road mapping process that we start with. We are in the process as we speak. So we start off at the end of the year as part of our annual operating plan, going through a, like a 12 month vision as to what it is, right? Longer than that, it's really hard in this world to say, oh, I've got a five year vision. We have customers ask for five year visions and I can paint something. It's pretty gray. You know, five years ago if somebody told me you're gonna have ChatGPT, I've probably said, I have no idea what's going. And then say the OpenAI CEO is gonna get fired and is work for Microsoft. That'll be impossible to predict. So we think of 12 month chunks and we think of 12 month chunks, and we take a ton of input, right? There's a lot of innovation from our own company. There's a ton of in in input we get from analysts in terms of where it's going with the Forester, Gartners, and IDCs of the world and other, other types of analysts. We speak a, spend a lot of time with customers trying to understand what it is that they've done, what they're, they're thinking from their goals in the next 12 months. And then, you know, obviously support and efficiencies that we've seen over the years through our customer success team. And so we go through this massive process of prioritizing all of those things, right? And we typically see 50 to 60% of our roadmap come from what our customers ask for. So it's definitely not a fast horse, right? But lean towards something that kind of makes sense for our customers, but is really focused on where we want to take the market. And we try to look for commonality across a lot of different customers. And then what? Our process basically validates that 12 month roadmap. But then we chunk it up every quarter. Every quarter we revisit what our, what's happening in the market, what's again happening with our customers and kind of reprioritize what we need. We don't spend a tremendous of time, amount of time worrying about competition. That's one of the things that we focus on is like we've got a large customer base. You know, obviously we believe in keeping them happy and satisfied because ultimately this industry is very, very word of mouth oriented. So that generating that flywheel within our customer base is obviously very, very critical for us and for us as we think of our roadmap. So our retention rate is very high as a business and we are really focused on getting enough customer feedback into our mapping process. So I don't know if I answered your question, but you know, we definitely don't over and over-index on customers, but you have a healthy level of involvement from them. Yeah.

Tom Raftery: 22:07

Okay, great, great. And what are the main trends you're seeing? I know you said you don't tend to look out kind of five years just because it all starts to kinda get fuzzy at that point. But what are the main trends you're seeing? Where, where are things going in your space?

Ram Venkataraman: 22:22

Yeah. I think if you, if you think about it for, from our perspective, B2B is a big aspect in terms of where we're focusing on, right? In terms of whether it's e-commerce or order management. We have another product that we launched last last year called subscriptions, and it's got applications both in the B2C side and the B2B side. So, big trend for us as we see this is heavy investment in the B2B space, both in e-comm and OMS. We've made a lot of investments in e-comm side. One of the big things that we're working on on the OMS side is to kind of think about from a distributor perspective and a wholesaler perspective in terms of their specific use cases. On how do we solve for it? That's one big aspect in terms of where we will continue to invest very heavily in, in bringing together integrations into the inventory system with the front end channel. But another big area where we are investing is tech partner ecosystem, right? One of the big things we started last year is as you, if you step back and think about an implementation, you spend as much time, maybe even more sometimes implementing our product. And hooking that and tying that to the, to the platforms that the customer has. So how can we invest and create out of the box connectors for ERP systems, for PIM systems, for e-commerce platforms, right? For inventory, other inventory platforms. So we've put a lot of investment in that area. You're gonna see us make a big investment further down into the ERP system. So having pre-built connectors with an SAP, a prebuilt connector with a NetSuite, a prebuilt connector with Dynamics, so on and so forth. So those are big areas that we are looking at to make big investments. Th there's just so much changing. There's always, you know, investments in machine learning that we talked about. We've been investing a lot in the demand forecasting concepts that I talked about. We are hoping to launch a product in 2024 around that.

Tom Raftery: 24:14

Okay. Okay. And. Are there any aspects of sustainability impinging on yourself or your customers that you'd like to talk about?

Ram Venkataraman: 24:23

Yeah, that's a, that's an interesting thing. You know, we as Vista companies, ESG is an aspect that we all have to focus in, which is a phenomenal thing. We have DI initiatives, we have ESG initiatives, so nothing specifically there at this point that I can point to you. But that is an ask in our road mapping process and how we think about it. So we put a lot of effort on our, on our infrastructure perspective to focus on that. So we've gone into more and more ARM chips as we think about it, versus looking at Intel and AMD chips. That's one way in terms of how we think about it. We've gone into just in time scaling.. Of our platforms to not have, you know, redundant capacities. But what are the, the problem we are trying to solve for right now is how can we help our customers solve for environment aspects of it, right? What can we do from their perspective to improve that? So I wish I had more concrete details for you today, but we talk to you soon. We'll talk about it. We'll, putting a ton of effort on our side in terms of how we can have specific ESG initiatives as a business. But we wanna kind of solve it for our customers also.

Tom Raftery: 25:34

Okay. What about exposing to those customers the savings they're getting from using your platform as a function of you shifting to ARM chips away from Intel and, you know.

Ram Venkataraman: 25:48

Yeah. Yeah. That's a, that's a great idea. So we're actually thinking about, hey, per order, one of the things that we do is we price our platform based on orders processed. Versus anything related to revenue, because it's really difficult to tell a customer, Hey, you're making a billion dollars, so you need to gimme a percentage of it. If that translate to be five orders, then we should just get processed on five. So the order based pricing that we have, we are trying to find a way to then show our customers, Hey, if we were on the old platform, this would be the impact. Now we are in the new, new version of chips, if you will, that's running the platform. This is what it's doing. So that's one of the angles that we're focusing on. But we want to think about from a supply chain perspective, if there's anything we can do, we may not be so deep enough in that to be able to help solve the problem. But I think what you're saying is one of the early ideas for us is to say, okay, you know, on an old chip, this is what our power, power consumption was on these new chips. This is what our power consumption is. Yes.

Tom Raftery: 26:49

Cool. Cool. Nice. We're coming towards the end of 2023 heading into 2024 now, Ram, do you have any predictions for supply chain for 2024 that you wanna talk about?

Ram Venkataraman: 27:06

I would be an extremely wealthy man if I could make that. Sure. I, I think in generally from a, I, I dunno if I have prediction for that, but in generally, you know, we're from a market perspective, 2023 obviously was a challenging year for a lot of us in this space. Especially as a business, you know, we are seeing a huge uptick in terms of businesses finally, you know, throwing back their investment thesis, wanting to invest in modern, modernizing their platform. So we are expecting this transformation to kick back and I feel like it slowed down quite a bit in 2023 at least in the early part of 2023 in the first half. And second half has been a lot more encouraging. So my prediction hopefully is that 2024 is the opposite in terms of where 2023 was in terms of where the world is headed. And I, I promise you, you know, AI and machine learning would definitely be a huge thing. I don't think that it takes a rocket scientist to make that prediction.

Tom Raftery: 28:05

Fair point, fair point, fair point. Cool. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now, Ram. Is there any questions that I haven't asked that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to think about?

Ram Venkataraman: 28:18

Yeah, just, just, I think we spent a lot of time talking about order management today. I just wanna make sure your listeners are aware that Kibo is a platform, is not just an order management aspect of it. We are very robust. e-Commerce platform and a very robust subscription platform. So, just wanna make sure that the level setting there, we spoke a lot from a supply chain aspects. Just wanna make sure your listeners were aware of that.

Tom Raftery: 28:43

Perfect. Great. And if people would like to know more about yourself, Ram, or any of the things we discussed on the podcast today? Where would you have me direct them?

Ram Venkataraman: 28:52

Yeah, Kibocommerce.com uh, was a great fa or you can, I obviously there on LinkedIn reach out me, Ram Venkataraman pretty straightforward to be able to access that. I'm happy to, happy to work with anybody who wants to know more about Kibo.

Tom Raftery: 29:06

Fantastic. Great Ram. That's been fascinating. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Ram Venkataraman: 29:11

Thank. Thanks for having me Tom.

Tom Raftery: 29:14

Okay, thank you all for tuning in to this episode of the Digital Supply Chain Podcast with me, Tom Raftery. Each week, over 3, 000 supply chain professionals listen to this show. If you or your organization want to connect with this dedicated audience, consider becoming a sponsor. You can opt for exclusive episode branding where you choose our guests or a personalized 30 second mid roll ad. It's a unique opportunity to reach industry experts and influencers. For more details, hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn or drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com. Together, let's shape the future of the digital supply chain. Thanks. Catch you all next time.