What's the next wave of PIM? Part 2

In the previous post, I offered a view to look at the PIM marketplace. From retailers and manufactories perspective, PIM has become a necessity to meet fast paced customer demands. The vendor marketplace, on the other hand, is getting crowded to meet the increasing demand. In that post, I also provided a few criteria to make sense of different vendor offers.

In this installment and the next, I intend to articulate a further criterion, or a standpoint to look at the PIM market. Let me first summarize what we have so far:

1. Some PIM vendors are traditional, some emerging, some disruptive (less than a handful)
2. Vendors tend to primarily focus on one target company size, i.e. enterprise, medium, and small companies
3. Finally, a practical way to group vendors is by the kind of use cases they are primarily designed for, e.g. emphasis on buying or selling side processes, marketing content, merchandising support, channels, etc.

From (1) one deduces that the market has been increasingly demanding PIM, at least for over a decade now, from (2) that PIM is (no longer) a need for a niche, and from (3) that there are various business areas that PIM can address but every and each vendor has designed their own solution with a clear (set of) predominant use case(s) in mind.

The last point offers a nice introduction to a fourth standpoint to which we now turn.

Historically, PIM and CDI (Customer Data Integration) predate MDM. In fact, MDM has common roots in two different parts of the business: how to achieve an holistic and semantically consistent view of product, and customer. Andrew White, the Gartner analyst, once put it clearly: “you can tell about where a vendor comes from by the way they talk about MDM’s history.  Too many relate MDM to CDI only, as if that were the source.  Too few related MDM to PIM only. The reality is that both are parts of MDM’s history. As PIM and CDI, these two technologies did start at different times, and in different industries, but they are part of MDM.”

While this is historically accurate, in my opinion, it does not capture how PIM has evolved in some quarters. But it is fair to say that a good chunk of the market is represented by what Mr. White says. Tom Marine over b2x Partners used the Family/Genius/Species analogy which is quite fitting as well (except for a couple of vendors which are of a different species ;-)). The point of the matter is that a good number of vendors come from this heritage and it is easy to identify them by name or by the way they emphasize two important things:

• The role of data as an asset
• Relationship between domains e.g. Customer, Suppliers, Products, etc.

A second species of PIM seems to lean towards a platform that is primarily a business application to serve the needs of marketing and sales departments. These vendors pay little emphasis on the role of data, or the importance of product hubs, quality of data, etc. – by no means essential elements – but stress the importance of having a product content platform to easily, collaboratively, and visually aggregate and organize (product) structured and unstructured content to be consumed inside and outside the organization.

Confused? Should you not! We will explore this new family of PIMs in the next installment.

For now, let me offer two simple considerations:

1.      PIM belongs to at least two solution spaces i.e. MDM and Content Management (please note: I am not confusing PIM and Content Management here). Among other things, this means the choice of the right PIM is strongly driven by demand  i.e. what use cases fit your problem

2.      The interesting and sometime  misleading debate over whether MDM and PIM are separate, or need to be married, etc. (for example, see here and here for an overview, while here, here, to see some interesting pro and against arguments) is squarely in the MDM family camp and it is easy now to see how to resolve the conundrum (this is left as the dreaded exercise for the reader :-)). On the other hand, this debate is utterly irrelevant in the Content Management camp. Thank you God!

Stay tuned.