The combined solution is the first to enable both purchasing and merchandising professionals to create and manage sophisticated catalogs for buying and selling goods and services over the internet. In addition, customers can extend this business process to include their suppliers. The solution enables suppliers to load product information into a customer’s catalog themselves, freeing the customer’s purchasing department from this time-consuming task.
For effective collaboration, businesses need to easily integrate content from many different sources into the applications, said Ram Gupta, PeopleSoft executive vice president of Products and Technology. Until now, such integration has been a problem for customers. By integrating Cohera’s solution with PeopleSoft’s collaborative applications, PeopleSoft is setting a new standard in private trading-exchange services.
AirClic Inc., a wireless information solutions company based in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, will realize immediate value from implementing the new system. We are purchasing PeopleSoft’s Cohera Catalog Management System to solve the complexity of combining catalog information from a wide variety of product and service providers, said Suren Gupta, AirClic executive vice president of Technology. The new eCommerce solution will allow us to easily integrate information from different formats and sources quickly and accurately, saving us time and giving our customers the highest-quality information.
PeopleSoft continues to demonstrate that it is adept at finding the right mix of partnerships, acquisitions, and internal development, said Bob Parker, vice president, B2E Commerce Strategies, at AMR Research Inc. The product content management capability picked up with the acquisition of Cohera, combined with the new functionality developed, earns PeopleSoft definite consideration for users looking to build a Private Trading Exchange, whether they are existing PeopleSoft users or not.
To support its catalog content integration initiative, PeopleSoft has created a network of leading content service partners, including: ADX-Advanced Data Exchange, British Telecom, Commerce One, eScout, EssentialMarkets, Metacat, Redknife, SPS Commerce, TPN Register, VerticalNet, and Zycus. PeopleSoft’s open architecture, combined with the offerings of these companies, will allow customers to create and adopt new content, access catalog information across networks regardless of its format, and manage complete supplier content relationships.
Having an open approach to catalog content management – particularly one that will appreciate the differences between a buy side and sell side environment – is a key differentiation in today’s market, said David Yockelson, senior vice president, Electronic Business Strategies, at META Group. A flexible catalog environment enables customers to adopt solutions that work for their enterprises rapidly; moreover, it can provide low risk, given the constant change that is a staple of today’s content market.
PeopleSoft’s acquisition of the intellectual property and certain assets of Cohera was a cash transaction completed on July 23, 2001. Cohera was a privately held company.
