Nothing gets software vendors more excited than new government regulations. Sarbanes-Oxley was a boon to enterprise software companies a few years ago. It allowed them to walk down the hall from the CIO's office and talk to the chief financial officer, the person who controls the company's purse strings. Similarly, TMS vendors welcomed the new Hours of Service regulations when they first went into effect in 2003. It was part of the "perfect storm" shippers and carriers were facing at the time (along with rising fuel costs and capacity constraints) that served as a catalyst for TMS sales. The latest regulation that has vendors seeing dollar signs is the Importer Security Filing (ISF) rule, better known to folks in the industry as "10+2."

The instability of the international container shipping sector, capacity withdrawal on some routes and "slow steaming" practices will expose exporters and importers to greater risks.

Companies and their logistics service providers need to reduce their international transport and logistics costs. Despite the uncertainties of the current business environment, they can apply both old and new techniques.

There are a lot of parallels between the logistics software industry and the logistics service provider industry. For example, both have undergone a lot of mergers and acquisitions over the past five years, and companies in both industries are looking to further penetrate the small and mid-sized market. And it's also true that the business models of software vendors and LSPs are converging. But an important distinction still remains between these two industries: one primarily sells "products" and the other primarily sells "services." When times get tough, companies tend to outsource more and spend less, which is why LSPs have historically performed better than software vendors during economic slowdowns. Does this mean that LSPs can breathe easy in 2009? Not exactly.