IBM has released its first middleware product designed
to help companies manage product information across their supply
chains.
IBM's WebSphere Product Center Version 5 is designed to help
companies manage all types of information about their products,
including price, location and promotions. It acts as a central
repository for data pulled in from a myriad of existing
applications.
IBM acquired the software through its acquisition of Trigo
Technologies in April. It is an upgrade to Trigo's existing
product, version 4.2, and is priced starting from $300,000
(£161,250) per processor, said Daniel Druker of IBM's WebSphere
products group.
Version 5 scales to support a higher number of product entries
than did its predecessor, and it can support a greater number of
simultaneous users on each server - as many as 30,000 or more,
according to Druker. Screens come back 40% faster on average for
end users and the interface now supports nine languages, he
said.
Key to the product is its ability to provide manufacturers,
retailers and other partners with synchronised, up-to-the-minute
information about products, Druker said. It can also feed data to
kiosks in retail stores where consumers can look up product
information.
IBM will to integrate WebSphere Product Center with WebSphere
Commerce in the fourth quarter, and with its WebSphere Portal and
RFID (radio frequency identification) middleware products at a
later date, he said.
Meanwhile, Oracle also plans to release a rival offering, called
Product Data Hub, later this year or early in 2005.
The Product Data Hub will be based on the same idea as its
Customer Data Hub, which was released in January. Customer Data Hub
provides businesses with a single view of all the information about
its customers, by consolidating customer data from different
sources, including non-Oracle applications.
Product Data Hub will be based on the same idea, acting as a
repository for information about pricing, product inventory numbers
and which suppliers should have access to which products, said
Ashinsh Mohindroo, product director for integration server
technology at Oracle. It will be introduced late this year or early
next year.
Oracle also announced its Application Server 10g has been
certified as supporting Intel's and Cisco Systems' implementations
of the RosettaNet B2B commerce protocol, as well as the EDIINT
(Electronic Data Interchange over the Internet) AS2 protocol used
by Wal-Mart Stores to do business with its suppliers, Mohindroo
said.
James Niccolai writes for IDG News Service