Well the David and Goliath battle continues. See the letter below. We all hope David can find a stone for his slingshot and get the giant between his you-know-whats.
GXS to Terminate Loren Data Interconnects
Marina del Rey, California – June 4, 2013 – GXS has begun notifying its customers of its intention to terminate connectivity to Loren Data’s ECGrid® EDI Network on March 4, 2014. GXS has posted this notice on its website: Interconnect Service Announcements (http://ow.ly/lERIw — if that link is broken, another copy of the notice can be found at http://tinyurl.com/kyv2x55). Additionally, Steven Scala, Senior Vice President Corporate Strategy and Development, has informed Loren Data that its ECGrid Service Provider customers must negotiate new connections directly with GXS and will not be allowed to move their accounts to any other VAN.
Loren Data disputes all allegations of that notice, including the misinformation claiming any part of this egregious act was negotiated with Loren Data. Any service issues mentioned in the GXS advisory are self-serving and falsely attributed to ECGrid. The uptime, visibility, accuracy and reliability of ECGrid are among the top in the industry. GXS’s refusal to establish industry standard interconnects between the competing networks since 2001 has forced excessive and unnecessary support burdens and expenses on Loren Data and on trading partners of both systems. GXS’s attempt to frame this as anything other than an anticompetitive attack on Loren Data and its customers is disingenuous.
Todd Gould, President of Loren Data, comments, “Far greater than the termination of the ICC interconnect by GXS in 2002, this is an unprecedented act of monopolistic power to control and eliminate competition in this market. The fundamental premise of EDI is to allow each trading partner to pick the solution provider and system that best suits its needs, not the one that best suits GXS.
“The list of actions taken by GXS against all EDI service providers, and Loren Data as a VAN for service providers, demonstrates a long and concerted effort to prevent new competition from entering the industry by controlling interconnects. These are the same interconnects that GXS enjoyed for its own benefit, and could not live without, through the early years of EDI.
“The acquisitions of both the IBM and Inovis VANs allowed GXS to acquire enough subscribers on its system to become an essential facility to connect to for all other EDI providers. GXS is now exploiting this purchased monopoly position to knock competition out of the market, rather than competing with better-valued products to win customers. How the GXS-Inovis merger survived a Hart-Scott-Rodino review in 2010 will always puzzle me, but with 20/20 hindsight it is clear that the merger should never have been allowed.”
Gould continues, “With over 1,000,000 mailbags successfully processed between GXS and Loren Data in May 2013 alone, it is unconscionable the amount of chaos and instability this latest move by GXS will create in the market.”
In response to GXS’s newest attempt to coerce its customers’ trading partners to sign up with “GXS-approved” providers or GXS directly, Loren Data is now offering end-users unprecedented direct access to ECGrid. This will insure continuity to the more than 12,000 trading partnerships that GXS is determined to disrupt. Any companies interested in taking advantage of this offer should contact Loren Data at gxs.alternative@ecgrid.com.
Loren Data continues to pursue all legal and administrative avenues available in addition to industry outreach. A Petition for Writ of Certiorari was submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court (No. 12-1273) on April 23, 2013 for the antitrust case of Loren Data Corp. v. GXS, Inc. Please contact Thomas Kettenmann (tkettenmann@LD.com) for access to the entire case history and any legal inquiries.
Loren Data’s ECGrid system is the preferred network for more than 10,000 trading partners, the majority of which are on major service providers such as SPS Commerce, CovalentWorks, NetEDI, EC InfoSystems, Radley Corporation, Pinnacle Data Systems, DiCentral and others. ECGrid currently services their customers’ 30,000+ trading partners on over 100 different systems including VANs, X.400 networks and direct connections. ECGrid is the only system developed specifically to meet the needs of EDI service providers, delivering the tools, visibility and reliability necessary to be a backbone EDI routing network. The industry leading ECGridOSSM web services API allows developers to deeply integrate EDI applications on top of the powerful ECGrid infrastructure. See http://www.LD.com and http://www.ECGridOS.com for more information.
ECGrid is a registered service mark and ECGridOS is a service mark of Loren Data Corp.
Contact:
Kristine Finlay
kfinlay@LD.com
Ph: +1-310-491-0380
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