IBM Corp. on Monday released its first middleware product designed to help companies manage product information across their supply chains. Oracle Corp. plans to release a competing offering, called Product Data Hub, late this year or early in 2005, an Oracle official said.

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 Inc. in April. It is an upgrade to Trigo's existing product, version 4.2, and is priced starting from US$300,000 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 percent faster on average for end users, he said, and the interface now supports nine languages.

Key to the product is its ability to provide manufacturers, retailers and other partners with synchronized, 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, he said.

IBM plans 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.

Oracle's Product Data Hub, meanwhile, 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, he said.

Separately last week, Oracle said its Application Server 10g has been certified as supporting Intel Corp.'s and Cisco Systems Inc.'s implementations of the RosettaNet business-to-business commerce protocol, as well as the EDIINT (Electronic Data Interchange over the Internet) AS2 protocol used by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to do business with its suppliers, Mohindroo said.

IDG News Service

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