There are no adequate solution providers in the real-time fulfillment planning market. Currently, there are three kinds of software vendors attempting to directly enter the real-time fulfillment planning market: enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), and order management systems (OMS) companies.

The competition's strength includes well-established market presence, sales and marketing, and diverse product offering. Weaknesses include huge investments and commitments to product bases that are not fundamentally suitable for real-time decision support. This is reflected in the fact that they are attempting to retrofit their existing solutions, circumventing the fulfillment planning's real-time performance requirement (milliseconds to seconds) by severely limiting the scope of the supply chain that is analyzed.

ICONOCI has recognized that the technological barriers in the development of such software are extremely high. Real time decision support requires a unique combination of optimization expertise, software development skills, and hardware knowledge that is not readily found in today's market. The vendors in today's market have failed to realize that standard software technologies found in the business world, such as relational databases, Java, and XML have been designed for ease of use but are insufficient for real time performance.

ERP and OMS systems approach involves an application server coupled to a data server - typically a relational or an object oriented database management system. These systems are fundamentally limited in their performance as they impose significant disk access delays for every transaction. In addition, they lack true optimization, as their searches are merely database lookups.

In contrast, SCM system's batch-oriented supply chain planning systems do provide optimization, but take hours to days to complete. These systems use custom, monolithic, memory resident data models that reside on one large machine - neither data nor processing is distributed. They are fundamentally limited by the physical memory and computing power available in a single machine. As a result they are constrained in their ability to scale and handle large problem sizes and high throughputs.

Key comparisons between ICONOCI's z!™ Fulfillment and other solutions by leading ERP and SCM vendors: