Speaker 2
been CEO at Blue Yonder for a couple of years now. So tell us a little bit about your career path and what your business goals are for Blue Yonder.
Speaker 1
in supply chain software and come from an engineering background. And that's very much the philosophy that I've brought to Blue Yonder. We're very much an engineering -tented company. And what that means, we have a belief that if you get product right, a lot of other things will take care of itself. And that's reflected in that we're spending, in the next three years, a billion dollars in R &D. So that's very much our core philosophy. And sort of like the five whys, when you see customer problems or you see problems that beyond it might be having, if you ask the five whys, you ultimately end up with something you can solve in the factory in engineering. And that's very much a core tenant of ours. And the second thing would be innovation. Innovation is the engine that drives the company. You know, last year we filed over 130 patents, mostly around AI. So it's really we do. We challenge conventional thinking in everything we do. We look for step changes in values for customers. The dirty secret of enterprise software is that the R and RMD doesn't exist. And it's actually research that actually drives fundamental breakthroughs. And that's very much what we do. So that's sort of to the company.
Speaker 2
Yeah, so you're in the supply chain space. Do you actually occupy every major position in your portfolio in that space? Or are there some gaps? We're arguably
Speaker 1
the broadest, most complete end -to -end solution in supply chain management. It's everything from the assortment you put in front of the consumer to how you forecast demand, where, when, where it's going to take place, how you facilitate all the inventory management, the production line in a manufacturing plant, how you orchestrate thousands of trucks for a CPG manufacturer or a large logistic company, all the way to a warehouse operation. So we run the gamut of it. And that's one of the reasons why a lot of large companies come to us because they want an integrated cohesive set of applications that you're buying to watch. Called a supply chain. We want the chain to be linked. So I've been in supply software my whole life. I'm from England, but the US has butchered my accent, so I sound Australian or South African. But my first job at a union in London was actually implementing a warehouse management system, which is basically, we have one of blue yonder. And then from there I went on into engineering and literally wrote forecasting and replenishment fulfillment systems from the ground up. So I've always been on sort of the customer value side, which gives you a lot of empathy to apply thinking around how you do software. And then on the engineering side, and that's, you know, it's very rare to have an engineering CEO and software, and it can only come in finance or IT or, you know, or sales. And So we're an engineering -led company.