When Content Works For E-commerce
Content Technologies Stretch into the heart of e-commerce.
Talk with Sam Jackobs
11 September 2001
When I made an appointment to speak to Sam
Jackobs about his company, Saqqara, and its main product, Contentworks, a cataloguing software solution, I did not expect the conversation to be very exciting.
But as content talk mixed with catalogue, taxonomies and data syndication talk I really felt at the right place at the right time.
Sam Jackobs joined Saqqara this year with twenty
years of experience in the IT industry under his belt.
"When I joined this company it had become obvious that
software technology had to become increasingly xml oriented, and the company has xml at the center of its strategy" says Jackobs
So what do you think is the general perception of the cataloguing industry
Catalogue software is a best of breed subset of content management Fundamental to any catalogue software solution is the ability to develop according to open standard architectures
Catalogs are the backbone of b2b, as they address
a substantial problem with e-procurement, which is based on speed and accuracy of the data and information that a system handles in any given moment.
Whatever way we look at it, eprocurement demands an awful lot of work to be done to sustain its growth
What is the challenge in putting a catalog online
A system should be able to offer completeness, information about all the products available, and accuracy.
If you were to look up a product catalog online, and the products that you are looking for are not there, you are not likely to use that system anymore.
Any consumer store, and or b2b exchange environment, should contain detailed and accurate data and should be easy to use, that's a challenge enough.
Another problem is the 'freshness' of the data.
In order for a system to update its data it must have some kind of automatic data syndication function, and last but not leas it must be able to classify that data according to a standard taxonomy.
What do you know about this taxonomy business
In addition to taxonomy creation software, a system must be able to conform to taxonomy standards, conventional classification systems generally brought about by an industry consortium.
I know that the paper industry, for example, has one.
We implemented the Rosettanet classification standard for the IT sector
What does your product do exactly?
Contentworks supports the autoclassification
of taxonomies
It takes data and classifies it according to the most appropriate product taxonomy. The idea is that Contentworks can plug into exsiting systems without much need for integration
Cmmercesuite, our other
'flagship' product specialises in the import of all types of searches and content indexing according to the most disparate criteria
How difficult is the process of taking raw data and sorting it into organised categories
Corporate Clients who have masses of product data have a problem when updating their online catalogues, expecially if they do so manually.
Converting the data from raw unstructured into sorted usable information is a cost that can be reduced by the right technology.
Our corporate motto is 'transform and exchange', and our approach to data conversion consists of five main steps
1. Create and manage standard and custom catalog taxonomies
2. Capture and manage product information from multiple sources
3. Automatically classify products to catalog taxonomies
4. Cleanse, rationalize and build product catalog content
5. Export to XML
There are over a dozen players in your sector, how do
you differentiate?
We differentiate thanks to our stratetgy of strong artnerships with technology providers such as Broadvision and vignette, we provide components
to their solutions that specialise in product data
What is your business goal?
We want to be the absolute premier vendor in the space
And what are the obstacles that you have to overcome to achieve that?
Scaling up as a company, geographical market coverage is a challenge to our current infrastructural capabilities, as well as keeping on track with what clients want. This market is moving very quickly and we must keep on top of it at all times
www.saqqara.com
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