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March 26, 2001

Net Commerce Equals Data Deluge

Content-management applications try to measure up to businesses' expanding requirements

By Alorie Gilbert (agilbert@cmp.com)

More on content distribution:

Syndicators Spin Out More News For Web Sites (2/26/01)

Database Aggregation (2/5/01)

TechWeb: Record Labels Warm To Digital Distribution (1/24/01)

s businesses ramp up their efforts to buy and sell to each other on the Internet, the need to populate Web sites with detailed product information from many suppliers--and keep that data fresh--has spawned a whole new category of software. Liaison Technology, which provides tools for updating product catalogs on the Web, last week expanded its offerings to try to fulfill the growing requirements of businesses coping with new content-management challenges.

The vendor has released Liaison Content Syndicator, an application that distributes and customizes information for online syndication on multiple Web sites. It also shipped an enhanced version of Liaison Content Exchange, which provides more tools for data accuracy and features an improved user interface for aggregating product data from different sources and in various file formats, including text, database, HTML, and XML. Content Syndicator starts at $125,000, and Content Exchange at $175,000.

Liaison says Content Exchange 3.0 runs 10 times faster than the previous version. That may settle concerns about the application's ability to meet the performance requirements of larger companies.

With just a handful of mostly small dot-com customers, such as EqualFooting.com Inc., an E-marketplace for small businesses, and LastMinuteTravel.com Inc., an online travel planning and purchasing company, the scalability of Liaison's technology has been a "little uncertain," says Granada Research founder and E-commerce analyst Torrey Byles.

But even with its new offering, Liaison doesn't provide everything companies need to manage online content. Neither do Cohera, Excara, Infinite Content, Requisite Technology, and Saqquara Systems, which compete in the same space as Liaison--and that's the problem, Byles says. For example, while Liaison's new product may give it the edge in grabbing data from different sources, other offerings--especially Requisite's--are better able to organize data so that it's easily searchable.

Also, none of the vendors completely automates management tasks. "It's still a labor-intensive process and hasn't become automatic as hoped," Byles says.

In addition, Byles says that a lot of these tool vendors have had very little market traction and few customers. Signs of consolidation are popping up in the highly fragmented and nascent market. In December, supply-chain software company i2 Technologies Inc. purchased ec-Content Inc., which develops and manages content for E-marketplaces and companies doing online procurement. Last month, digital document-management provider Open Pages Inc. acquired Viveca Inc., which makes online catalog software.