Since the gas and diesel price hikes of the mid-2000s, industries across the board have taken hard looks at their energy expenditures and how to reduce them. Nowhere is this more apparent than in trucking, where logistics companies now employ sensors and global positioning systems in their vehicles to monitor the driving habits of their drivers, such as how they use the brakes and whether they are heavy on the gas pedal.

As companies go global in their operations, they need new solutions for managing risk that can traverse countries and link in thousands of worldwide suppliers. Cloud is coming to the rescue where internal systems can't. Here are three cloud supply chain niche solutions that are gaining traction, and why.