Like many companies, Office Depot parent ODP Corp. is driving through 2021 expecting a stronger year after an unusually tough 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic caused many of its core business and school customers to close.
But unlike others, ODP also has a fresh multi-pronged strategy to build out B2B digital commerce sales that provided some of the company’s best sales performance in its most recent financial quarter. To lead its B2B ecommerce technology and strategy, ODP recently hired former Amazon Business head Prentis Wilson, who oversaw the surging growth of Amazon.com Inc.’s B2B marketplace into an ecommerce business with $10 billion in annualized sales within the first few years of its 2015 launch.
ODP is also looking ahead to building out its B2B digital commerce capabilities through its recent acquisition of e-procurement software company BuyerQuest and ODP’s new cloud technology arrangement with Microsoft Corp. ODP says it will use Microsoft’s Azure cloud technology to improve the operation of its online procurement technology and make it available to new and existing customers that use Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Business Central enterprise resource planning system.
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