Pimcore has launched a tool designed to solve what its co-CEO suggests is an overlooked challenge in the quest to improve customer experience: bringing product details, digital assets and other information into a common format for use in e-commerce and other areas.
The company, which is originally from Austria but has U.S. offices in Houston, said the Pimcore Data Hub would offer enterprises an open source way to develop applications for managing data like web content in a consistent way across multiple channels.
According to Shashn Shah, examples of potential Pimcore Data Hub customers would include manufacturers that offers laptops, keyboards, monitors and other hardware products. Each of those products could be organized by categories and sub-categories based on components like processors, memory or the size of hard drives. In some cases this could lead to 20 to 50 attributes around various items. Pimcore Data Hub would simplify the process of setting up an online store for a retailer selling such products, he said, or creating a supplier portal for B2B types of orders.
“When it comes to data management, the buyer is usually the CIO — they’re doing the backend work with all the data,” Shah told B2B News Network. “When you’re talking to experience management — the storefronts, e-commerce and so on — the buyer tends to be the CMO because they care more about the experiences, ease of use and properly organizing the data so it can be consumed for the end user.”
The value of an open source approach means that companies can also plug in the applications they create using Pimcore Data Hub into existing tools such as SiteCore or Adobe Experience Manager, Shah added. There is also the relative cost efficiencies of not having to pay for licensing or subscription fees. In some scenarios, he said the return on investment for customers could be six months or less.
“(The costs for using Pimcore) is more like a capital cost, to spend time to implement it or to make certain customizations in the software to meet their needs,” he said.
Early adopters of Pimcore Data Hub include one of Pepsi’s divisions in China, which is using the tool to ease online ordering for distributors and allowing them to manage their own online catalogue.
Shah said that while Pimcore Data Hub brings value to both IT and marketing departments, they tend to be ultimately towards towards the same goal.
“Having an ability to transform the data into any kind of data format is the ultimate necessity. Data hub provides that ability,” he said. “For almost any organization, this will become an extremely high priority.”
