Grid Dynamics Sets Sights on E-Commerce in the Cloud

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As a provider of e-commerce software, Grid Dynamics has been at the forefront of building omni-channel platforms that make it simpler for organizations to coordinate the selling of goods and services via multiple Web and mobile computing applications and services. Now Grid Dynamics is gearing up to take those capabilities into the cloud.

Following the acquisition of Qubell, a provider of an application management platform for the cloud, Grid Dynamics CEO Leonard Livschitz says that technology, newly rechristened Tonomi, will provide part of the foundation Grid Dynamics needs to turn its software into a multi-tenant application that can be deployed in a cloud.

To help fund that effort, Grid Dynamics has also revealed that it has raised an undisclosed amount of additional capital from a venture capital firm. In part, those funds, said Livschitz, will be used to accelerate the integration of the Tonomi technology with Grid Dynamics software. As a close partner of Grid Dynamics, Livschitz says the formal acquisition of Qubell will provide deeper access to the application development and continuous delivery expertise using microservices technology that Grid Dynamics needs to efficiently deliver updates to cloud applications.

In general, Livschitz says Grid Dynamics is able to fend off larger rivals such as Oracle and IBM because as a best-of-breed e-commerce platform it integrates more smoothly with a broader number of third-party e-commerce platforms. In contrast, much larger rivals are trying to drive customers to standardize on entire suites of applications at the expense of providing a better integration experience with the application software that most IT organizations already have installed.

Of course, when compared to those competitors, Grid Dynamics is clearly a little behind the curve in terms of making the shift to the cloud. That may affect its ability to attract new customers that are committed to the cloud. At the same time, however, Livschitz notes that when it comes to e-commerce applications that are often the transaction lifeblood of an organization, the pace at which IT organizations are moving those applications to the cloud is most definitely more deliberate than all the hype surrounding cloud application software would otherwise suggest.