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Following up on its promise to release at least three data hubs this year, Oracle Corp. announced its Product Information Management Data Hub last week, the second such release since the concept was announced in January 2004.
The data hub, part of Oracles Fusion middleware stack announced last month, enables companies to aggregate, clean and synchronize data culled from a variety of applications in a central location, based on parameters.
PIM Data Hub allows users to consolidate product information—such as data related to BOMs (bills of materials), sales configurations, engineering, manufacturing specifications and accounting—from different applications and aggregate it into a single repository.
They can then manage and synchronize the data and push it back to systems such as UCCnet Inc.s GDSN (Global Data Synchronization Network), an item registry for manufacturers.
PIM Data Hub draws on Oracle E-Business Suites underlying data model for its product information. That data model has been extended for PIM Data Hub to include various areas of compliance support, such as GDSN.
A PIM Data Library allows users to extend the underlying data model even further so they can go in and create user-defined data attributes around a product data model, according to John Webb, vice president of application strategy at Oracle.
“Customers can start with the PIM data model today, and they can license the PIM Data Library and sync with other legacy systems,” said Webb in Redwood Shores, Calif. “Really, from a [users] standpoint, what theyre trying to do is manage all information across the enterprise; PIM is in context of a particular situation—manufacturers using UCCnet. Were talking about that plus all other areas.”
Other data hubs expected from Oracle this year include a citizen data hub for government agencies and an accounting hub.