IBM integrates Trigo's PIM with WebSphere
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 6/1/2005 6:00:00 AM
Leveraging last year's acquisition of Trigo—a product information management (PIM) vendor—IBM has now integrated Trigo's PIM functionality with IBM WebSphere, which offers Internet infrastructure software—or middleware—for creating, running, and integrating applications across various computing platforms.
Branded IBM WebSphere Product Center, the package blends product information management—also known as master data management—into WebSphere Commerce and WebSphere Portal.
PIM is an emerging supply chain application that supplements advanced planning by identifying exactly what happens with a product while it is in transit to the retailer, or how fast it is moving off the shelves. PIM systems synchronize the data that governs pricing, promotions, and features so everyone in the finished-goods supply chain is reading from the same page. PIM also can be used to synchronize consumer-oriented product kiosks or Web commerce sites with the latest product data and pricing.
Although PIM has drawn interest from supply chain, manufacturing, and retail system vendors alike—including pure-plays such as FullTilt, and retailing software vendors QRS and Retek (recently acquired by Oracle after a battle with SAP)—for the most part, the competition is homegrown software. So says Dan Druker, IBM's director of product management, who adds, "Companies are managing this mostly with spreadsheets."
Although IBM says it is no longer in the application software business, the Trigo acquisition a year ago raised questions as to whether it was crossing the line. "We needed to reach out to line-of-business buyers with industry solutions," says Druker.
On the horizon, IBM Product Center will eventually expand coverage to unstructured data to provide information on product attributes, or links to documentation that might not reside in databases.
