Michael McGrath, the recently appointed CEO and president of troubled supply chain management software vendor i2 Technologies Inc., has started to make his mark on the firm. At the i2 user conference this week, the company unveiled a number of new initiatives and detailed cost-cutting steps it has taken in an effort to return to profitability.

McGrath discussed his recent moves with Computerworld during the i2 Planet 2005 event here in Phoenix.

Can you discuss the resizing you recently undertook? It ended at the end of March. We cut about 15% of employees, very disproportionately. It was more higher-level employees, so the cost reduction was a lot more. Lots of the cuts affected excess overhead, and not people doing productive work. I"m reasonably confident we cut people we shouldn"t have, but we had to act quickly. We"ll recover from that.

Within research and development, we made some cuts. There we have a big opportunity to improve productivity, even with the reduction we made. Going forward, we"re working for a major release by July around the Agile Business Platform. I think we can be more productive and give more value for our customers with fewer people.

This week you signed an agreement with Microsoft to integrate with its technology. What does this mean for your traditional users on IBM platforms? Not much. We have a strong relationship with IBM. It doesn"t diminish our partnership with IBM, which is still strong. We expect to expand ongoing work with IBM. Microsoft gives us a few new capabilities.

What"s the next new thing in supply chain management? Our customers want to [implement quickly] in four to six months, and we can do that, using pilots for them quickly. We don"t have to implement the product and then find out something is missing.

One user complained about lack of integration between you and SAP. Are there any plans to further open your technology to competitive applications? I agree wholeheartedly. We"re opening up the architecture to be a more open system. We don"t do this today because NetWeaver isn"t fully developed, but our intention is to deliver the i2 Agile Business Platform, and they have the choice to plug SAP into that.