Mens Et Opera - Reloaded

This is the third instalment of the series about the present and future of PIM. Readers are invited to take a look at the previous posts ( here , here ) and the interlude about the interplay of content and data . PIM as a content and publishing platform Longtime readers will be familiar with my approach to PIM. In short, PIM is a discipline, or at least the fundamental tenets of PIM are dictated by how businesses operate to bring products they sell to life, and not by technology vendors (that’s why it is a discipline). As such, it is a discipline that ties in a number of processes such as product introduction, product lifecycle management, supplier collaboration, customer conversion, etc. (being a discipline is a beautiful thing because it springboards innovation (but this is a different story…). Now, and this is the crux of the matter, to mature a product into a state where it can be sold across multiple customer touch points requires a systematic approach to developing and c...

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: Some PIM vendors are traditional, some emerging, some disruptive (less than a handful) Vendors tend to primarily focus on one target company size, i.e. enterprise, medium, and small companies 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 bee...