Trigo tackles product information management

Start-up Trigo Technologies this week announced a new version of its software for managing product information. It's designed to help companies get control of product information that's typically created by different people from multiple departments and scattered across a company in various storage locations.

Available now, Trigo Enterprise 3.0 aims to simplify the gathering and distribution of product information for manufacturers and distributors. The software acts as a central repository for all product data, and then publishes the data to a variety of internal and external sources including Web sites, branch offices, print catalogs, e-procurement platforms, and enterprise resource planning applications.

Whereas customer relationship management (CRM) software aggregates and disseminates information about customers, Trigo Enterprise aggregates and disseminates information about products, says Tom Reilly, CEO of the Brisbane, Calif. company.

New to version 3.0 are security and alerting features that let companies automate and enforce procedures for managing product information. For auditing purposes, Trigo Enterprise now tracks and logs each change to product data. In addition, Trigo enhanced its unit-of-measure and multilingual features in version 3.0.

A division of International Paper, xpedx is the first company to adopt Trigo Enterprise 3.0. xpedx will use the software to manage information about 200,000 products and deliver product content to any person or entity that needs it - including divisions, customers, partners and e-commerce sites, says David Wallace, director of e-business at the $6.5 billion distributor of paper, packaging supplies and equipment. "By distributing our product information to all of these touch points, we accelerate our time to market significantly."

Additional Trigo customers include Corporate Express, Staples and Moore.

Founded in January, 2001, Trigo gets its name from a medieval trade route in the Ukraine, along which goods from the Middle East, India and China were carried to western Europe. The route was known as "Trigo," the Spanish word for "wheat."