Suite hunts product data

Poet Software Corp. has penned another verse to its content management product portfolio, adding a catalog tool.

This week, the San Mateo, Calif., company will debut the Poet eCatalogue Suite, an application for extracting product data from corporate sources and then managing and distributing the content over the Internet for business-to-business e-commerce applications.

Relying on XML (Extensible Markup Language) and Poet's object-oriented database technology, eCatalogue Suite pulls data from databases and customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning applications and stores the data in a separate master catalog.

eCatalogue Suite users can then edit the data, adding descriptions and images to make it useful to buyers, and generate dynamic catalogs for each buyer or marketplace according to buyers' profiles.

The catalog is then transmitted via the Internet, from which it can be loaded into procurement software or into a portal of aggregated content using XML.

eCatalogue Suite is the second phase of Poet's strategy to offer XML-based products. The company shipped Version 2.0 of its Content Management Suite in June.

Available now, eCatalogue Suite starts at $30,000 with one XML adapter included. Additional XML modules are $2,000. A software developer kit is available for $8,000. Poet is at (650) 286-4640 or www.poet.com.