E-Commerce Tools, Standards Alleviate Catalog Headaches

Managing catalog content is becoming a major sore point for IT managers as new venues, such as storefront sites, extranets and procurement hubs, proliferate for Web-catalog content.

Several recent developments aim to bring some order to the chaos. Microsoft and Ariba this week agreed to work together on XML-based e-commerce standards that could potentially alleviate some problems for catalog providers.

Meanwhile, at its user conference in Chicago this week, Sterling Commerce Inc. rolled out a series of new products and partnerships designed to help users manage catalogs and extranet relationships.

And next week, start-up vendor FactPoint is unveiling technology that, among other applications, can be used to ensure the accuracy of catalog data published to various Web sites.

What these and other ongoing developments point to are the massive challenges facing online sellers. Not only do they have to develop an information repository and infrastructure to manage their own data, they have to establish procedures to publish that catalog data--often with urgent demands for customization--to an ever-increasing number of locations.

“Sellers are encountering site maintenance difficulties when they've made a commitment to customize extranets or catalog deployments to multiple buyers,” said Vernon Keenan, an independent e-commerce analyst.

Emerging trading hubs like Ariba.com or vertical portals like Chemdex.com could potentially alleviate some of those problems by offering content management services, but such hubs also are proliferating at such an alarming rate that they themselves are putting a strain on catalog publishers, Keenan said.

For users like supplies powerhouse W.W. Grainger, the e-commerce mandate remains clear: “The easier you make it for customers to do business with you, the more orders you're going to get,” said Daniel Hamburger, president of Grainger Internet Commerce. “You've got to be able to provide buy-side content if that's what the customer wants. You have to provide a direct-access Web site, and you have to be on every virtual desktop by working with the software players.”

But, he added, “That strategy is not for the meek, and it calls for a tremendous investment.”

W.W. Grainger has aimed much of that investment at its product information, which it views as “a key strategic asset,” Hamburger said. That includes dedicating a group inside the company specifically to manage product information and building a common information repository--residing in an Oracle database and managed via a variety of management tools from Requisite and other vendors--to enable the publishing of catalogs to any format, Hamburger said.

Taking a similar tack is Richardson Electronics, which this month launched a Web catalog of more than 200,000 products based on a repository it built with vendor Flow Systems Corp. Thanks to the common repository, which feeds not only Web catalogs but also those in print, Richardson took just five months to get the massive catalog up and running, said Kevin Reilly, the electronics distributor's vice president and CEO.

Flow Systems, founded by executives from printing giant RR Donnelley, builds media-independent databases that deliver catalogs to a variety of venues, including to trading portals like Ariba.com or Harbinger.net, said Flow Systems CEO Alister Gibson.

Most sellers, Gibson said, consider their product information and their ability to uniquely deliver it to customers a strategic advantage they can wield against competitors. The Web makes those processes even more strategic.

“Print catalogs are an event. Web catalogs are a process,” Gibson said.

It is a process that is becoming increasingly complex. One solution is standards. But in the e-commerce arena, standards have been as convoluted as the problems they aim to solve.

Looking to simplify matters, Microsoft and Ariba Inc. agreed to work together on e-commerce standards, integrating the Ariba-driven Commerce XML (cXML) tag-sets for e-procurement into Microsoft's XML-based BizTalk framework.

cXML provides tags to support supplier content and catalog models, including transaction information for purchase orders, change orders, status updates and payment. BizTalk, in turn, provides an umbrella framework for integrating applications and business processes between users. BizTalk will support any XML schema written using the BizTalk guidelines, which Microsoft says will track with industry standards.

Thus, one of the key elements of the Microsoft-Ariba partnership is that Ariba will rewrite the next version of cXML using the XML-Data Reduced spec, which Microsoft has submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium as a potential alternative to today's XML Data Type Definitions, or DTDs, said Marcus Schmidt, Microsoft's industry manager for supply chain applications.

“We still don't have the complete picture of XML out of Microsoft yet, but this move does something to address the potential balkanization effect that BizTalk had hanging over it,” said analyst Keenan.

Meanwhile, Sterling Commerce unveiled a road map to help users manage catalogs and extranet relationships, including reliance on heavy doses of XML. The offerings, which build on Sterling's core Commerce, Connect and Gentran products, include extranet and community management services; business-process integration via traditional EDI and enterprise application integration tools; and e-commerce infrastructure and outsourcing initiatives.

The expanding and unique qualities of Web trading communities is bringing with it unique problems as sellers syndicate content to hundreds of sites. Addressing that problem is FactPoint, which next week releases a first-of-its-kind server that sets in place processes to help companies certify and validate all the content and product data published to Web sites and partner extranet sites.

“The Web presents the opportunity to dynamically change content and offers on the fly,” said Jothy Rosenberg, CEO of FactPoint. “But the complexity of managing product information in a coherent way can be really difficult.”