Cover Story
Changing the default
INTTRA market share loss suggests new ocean freight booking landscape
By Eric Johnson
For nearly two decades , the almost default setting for electronic ocean freight bookings was INTTRA , a platform created in 2000 by a group of ocean carriers to allow booking requests and shipping instructions to be submitted via an online portal .
INTTRA reached a high-water mark in 2018 , touching 26 % of all ocean freight bookings , which represented 52 % of all electronic bookings at the time , according to a 2018 company statement . At that peak , INTTRA was connected to 65 carriers and served as the conduit for 46 million container bookings .
That year , 2018 , was also the year INTTRA was acquired by supply chain software provider e2open , where it still resides among a half-dozen other acquisitions e2open made over the last decade .
But INTTRA ’ s dominant share of electronic bookings has gradually eroded since the acquisition , with e2open CEO Andrew Appel saying during an April earnings call that the company ’ s “ logistics ecosystem ” now handles 21 % of all ocean freight bookings .
INTTRA is still a key player in the electronic bookings space . But according to a range of technology providers that spoke to the Journal of Commerce , its position is more tenuous than it has ever been , thanks to a range of factors .
For one , the options for shippers and forwarders to make booking requests to carriers has widened in the past decade . Most of those booking options are aligned with transportation management systems ( TMSs ), meaning a user can book space and tether that booking to management of the shipment within the same system . INTTRA , by contrast , was originally set up to be independent of any single TMS and instead partnered with TMSs used by forwarders and shippers .
Second , some ocean carriers have made it easier for shippers and forwarders to book directly through online portals or application programming interfaces ( APIs ) that did not exist for much of INTTRA ’ s existence . These e-commerce tools are a growing focus for carriers targeting small and mid-size shippers and forwarders that were previously aggregated by large forwarders or consolidators .
“ If you work with three carriers ... you may need 10 versions of an integration .”
A third reason is that when INTTRA was acquired by e2open , which itself provides transportation management solutions , it stopped being seen as a neutral provider of ocean freight e-commerce services by some forwarders , even if the INTTRA platform still operates independently .
A bigger electronic market
In trying to evaluate the extent to which INTTRA ’ s market position has faltered , it is also important to understand how much electronic booking activity has grown since INTTRA controlled more than half of that market . In the last six years , the proportion of electronic booking requests to total booking requests has grown substantially , although data on that metric is difficult to find .
Sources have estimated at least 60 % of bookings are now submitted electronically , although the actual number
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is likely even higher . That means it is almost certain that INTTRA ’ s share of total electronic bookings has likely declined more than its drop of 26 % to 21 % in total bookings market share would suggest .
E2open did not immediately respond to a Journal of Commerce request for comment .
The drop in INTTRA ’ s market share is indicative of a change in the broader ocean freight technology ecosystem . INTTRA was born during the infancy of the internet , and much of the 2000s were spent convincing an intractable industry that processes such as booking requests and shipping instructions submissions could be conducted safely and efficiently online .
INTTRA did not tackle that mission alone . Its primary rivals in the electronic bookings space , GT Nexus ( now Infor Nexus ) and CargoSmart , were similarly web-based and cloud-hosted systems , and the three companies spent much of their marketing budget assuring the industry that multi-tenant software , hosted in the cloud , was the way of the future .
14 Journal of Commerce | July 29 , 2024 www . joc . com