WebSphere Product Center helps companies develop and manage a central, accurate, comprehensive repository of product information. By improving and controlling how product information is organized and handled throughout an organization, companies can reduce data errors, redundant product information, and manual processes. In turn, this helps improve workload management, resolve bottlenecks, increase productivity and speed new product introductions.

"Master data management has emerged as an important way to improve information delivery in the enterprise, enabling organizations to make better decisions by providing richer, more accurate and more contextual information," said Paraic Sweeny, vice president, product information management solutions, IBM. "Organizations are using our market-leading master data management software to standardize product information used throughout their enterprise and supply chain, providing them with a competitive edge and new business flexibility."

To accelerate integration with applications across an SOA, the new version of WebSphere Product Center leverages a Java API and Web services to expose commonly used business objects and support query functions, allowing users to more quickly and easily integrate with other applications across the enterprise. This helps simplify the process of disseminating accurate product information.

WebSphere Product Center also features enhanced search capabilities, which enables clients to code searches using SQL-like queries. This new feature speeds the implementation of searches, allowing organizations to more easily retrieve the information they need.

With its enhanced product location management, WebSphere Product Center also offers support for location information and associated product information, critical for companies that have location-sensitive product information, such as vendor sourcing, terms and conditions and promotions. It also offers support for location-specific searches allowing users to quickly locate information specific to a regional or store-specific promotion, information about location-specific pricing, and information about which product assortments are being sold in a particular store.

WebSphere Product Center is currently available from IBM and IBM Business Partners.