AUSTIN, TEXAS March 12, 2001 Liaison Technology, a provider of infrastructure software products that manage catalog content for online commerce, today announced the Catalog Content for Collaborative Commerce (C4) Architecture. The C4 architecture is Liaison's approach to solving a serious obstacle faced by companies trying to increase online revenue. Current methods for building and maintaining electronic catalogs of product information are slow, costly and labor-intensive.
The Liaison C4 Architecture defines how manufacturers, distributors and marketplaces can increase e-commerce revenue through the automation and management of electronic catalog content. It serves as the foundation for Liaison's solutions for aggregating, managing and syndicating catalog content for e-commerce platforms. The open architecture enables the development by third-party suppliers of extensible applications that work with Liaison's products to ease the flow of catalog content up and down the supply chain.
"With its C4 architecture, Liaison demonstrates that it understands and can support the requirements for automating and streamlining the entire catalog content management process," said Tim Minahan, director of e-business research at Aberdeen Group. "With this month's release of the Liaison Content Exchange 3.0 and Liaison Content Syndicator 1.0, Liaison is quickly delivering the components of a very comprehensive solution that could dramatically lessen the burdens associated with catalog management and fill the gaps of many existing e-commerce and content solutions."
Using the C4 architecture as a foundation, Liaison is developing software solutions to automate critical aspects of catalog content management. These include gathering transactive and descriptive content from various sources; transforming and rationalizing this content into a searchable product database; customizing and syndicating (publishing) the content in numerous XML formats to leading e-commerce platforms; and providing application program interfaces (APIs) so third-party developers can provide value-added solutions, and so the catalog content process can be integrated with other mission-critical enterprise systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Resource Management applications.
