Office products vendor Corporate Express is about to abandon its old system -- a private marketplace it runs using an Oracle database back end, a Microsoft Access front end, and a collection of SQL scripts to tie it all together, and replace it with a whole new exchange it calls E-Way. Based on software from developer Trigo, E-Way incorporates all the information about the pens, paper, printers, and other products that Corporate Express sells -- some 175,000 items, more than twice as many as were available on the old marketplace -- and presents it in a way that's most convenient for the customers, says Chuck Coleman, director of e-business for Corporate Express. "In terms of the richness of the content, and accommodating customers in terms of the keywords they wanted to use to look up products, we were able to have a cleaner, more efficient, authoring process," Coleman says. The name of Trigo's product is a mouthful: Trigo Product Center for the Enterprise. But where it fits in the world of Web software is even more of a muddle. Though Trigo calls its software "product information management (PIM)," it sounds suspiciously like content management products from Interwoven or Vignette, or electronic catalog management from Requisite or Saqqara, or even digital asset management products from Documentum or Verity. So what distinguishes PIM from all those other three-letter abbreviations? According to Trigo, it's the focus on the product itself -- how it's described and how it's marketed (i.e., with different descriptions for different channels), as opposed to managing other Web-site content that needs to be updated but doesn't necessarily describe a product. What's in a name?
Still confused about PIM's differentiation? "Welcome to the club," says Gartner analyst Geoffrey Bock. "In my mind, content management refers to any digital asset that you can create or manage for any purpose. PIM is a specialized kind of content management." The challenges that Trigo faces -- along with Trilogy and Cedron, other vendors of PIM software -- are twofold: It needs to manage large structured and unstructured data in a systematic way, and integrate product information into its business processes. Because the Internet has introduced new points of interaction and removed the middleman, people can buy products from an exponentially higher number of places. "Our customers tell us that they want someone, whether they come to the Web site, or get a printed catalog from a salesperson, to get a consistent message," says Russ Henry, Trigo's senior vice-president of marketing. That's why having a PIM system, which maintains that consistency, no matter what the description's final form, is important.