How PIM Systems Handle the Complexities of Product Data Management

Gary Ballabio: [00:00:00] Hi everyone. I’m Gary Ballabio, Vice President of Technology Partnerships here at Cloudinary. And this is MX Matters, where we discuss all things media experience, and trends that shape the visual economy.

Today I am happy to be here with Johan Boström, co-founder and CPO at inriver to learn more about inriver and its business.

Johan, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.

Johan Boström: Thank you so much, Gary. Thank you for having me.

Gary Ballabio: So first thing, it would be great if you could just give a little bit of a background on inriver, who you are, your mission and how you help customers.

Johan Boström: Yeah, for sure. We’re a SaaS-based software company.

We are within the product information management space or product experience management space, meaning that we basically take a bare bone SKU from an back office system like an ERP or a PLM or a supplier, maybe 10 attributes, as of half of them not interesting to a consumer or a buyer at all, and we put them through a process where we enrich all [00:01:00] of the properties on the product.

So we add, of course, digital assets of all kinds, and we have text being written, text being localized. We add bundles and kits. We can put it into geo information, and basically dress it up so that a consumer or a buyer have the knowledge and the information available so they can make a purchasing decision.

So we basically do that as fast as possible and as complete as possible. And then we publish it to Amazon, to e-commerce sites. We do printed catalogs. We can do point of sales solutions, we can do integrations with configurators, all depending on the industry that the customer is in.

Gary Ballabio: Can you talk a little bit about the motivation for founding the company and what was the problem that you saw in the market that you thought drove the need for a company like inriver to be in the market?

Johan Boström: Like a lot of things, it’s a coincidence. It’s like, you know, you have a banana, and you trip on it and you slide and it’s what you make [00:02:00] out of it that is make or break success, but we worked in the telco sector quite a lot, me and some of my colleagues. This was under the telco explosion in the Nordics with Nokia and Ericsson and all of those going haywire. And they of course, released products like there was no tomorrow. And the telco operators, like the Verizons of the world, they had a lot of products coming, hardware products, and software products, and they were expanding rapidly across the globe.

We dealt with their web presence and we built tens or hundreds of sites, and we realized that most of these sites were just different brands on the same information, same coverage map for Greece, for all of the brands that were subbrands. So we started thinking, hey, we should probably move the maintenance of this upstream so we can use one single source of truth for all these satellite systems.

And what we actually did was that we built something called the Oracle, and the oracle was a PIM. We didn’t call it a [00:03:00] PIM back then. Gartner hadn’t invented the acronym, but today, looking back and connect the dots, it was a PIM that we built. And eventually we built that for quite a few customers, bespoke systems.

We saw the need in mid-size manufacturing especially, so we wanted to package it up as a product and go to market through a partner network. So we did. And that sort of became inriver.

Gary Ballabio: So it was a partner first approach. I didn’t realize that.

Johan Boström: Always, we’ve always had a partner first approach. I mean, we had a few years when we did our own implementations and we had some partners. In 2007, we divested all our consulting. The right thing to do at the wrong point in time, as 2008 wasn’t a fun year for anyone, I think.

But given what we have done after that, it’s been really good to have a strong foundation and a partner network gives us and our customers way more reach, way more knowledge about different systems and industries that’s very beneficial to the whole ecosystem. So, we truly appreciate our partners a [00:04:00] lot because we are in a very good symbiosis with them.

Gary Ballabio: Well, as a guy on the partner team at Cloudinary, I definitely appreciate hearing that for sure.

So just from a product standpoint, I mean, it’s clear to me what the problem is that there’s a lot of information, a lot of assets, that go along with any product that you’re trying to sell in the market. There’s all sorts of written documentation, there’s images, there’s videos, there’s demos, there’s all sorts of stuff. So clearly being able to organize that is pretty critical for an e-commerce provider. Are there any real world use cases or examples that you can provide that help the listeners understand or conceptualize the importance of a PIM a bit more?

Johan Boström: The problems are a little bit different depending on industry. If it’s let’s say an industrial manufacturer, they typically sell equipment.

Equipment is a solution that is configured to a certain customer. Let’s say take an industrial welding robot as an example. It gets designed and configured to maybe just weld one piece on a Volvo, [00:05:00] that’s what it does. It can’t do anything else, but it’s perfectly aligned with the Volvo. That will have a lifecycle that’s probably 10, 15, 20 years.

And during the lifecycle, it will need parts, it’ll need accessories, it’ll need consumables, it’ll need service. So for them being able to sort of manage all this information, all the specification data, service manuals, spare parts lists, and have that available in maybe Salesforce Service Cloud so that they can service their customers, have it in Salesforce Revenue Cloud so they can configure the solution, have it available in Salesforce Commerce Cloud so they can sell the parts, so the customers can order them, is very important.

And we’re talking about often millions of SKUs, hundreds of thousands of products, maybe with thousands of attributes with hundreds of documents and videos and images, and of course, add to that localization. If you are a large company, you are likely global, so you need [00:06:00] it in Japanese, in Swedish, in German, in English, in Spanish, and so forth.

And the localization in itself is very tough when you have millions of records with hundreds or thousands of attributes. And then you have the fashion companies that we work with. For them, speed is everything. They maybe have a two week life cycle. If that welding robot is alive and kicking for 20 years, the t-shirt maybe lived for like two weeks.

So, for them it’s very important that they can keep up the production very quickly because without the images, without the attributes, without the material composition, no one will buy a t-shirt even online. And the more complex the products are, the more expensive they are, the more important the product information gets, of course.

So if you are within luxury goods or if you sell cars, or if you sell refrigerators, that’s a high engagement decision for the customer. They will do a lot of research before they buy a new sofa or a new TV. That’s when you really need to shine. You [00:07:00] need to stand out. You need to see to that you are the one that gets visibility on third party sites too, like Amazon and Best Buy and others.

Gary Ballabio: Let’s fast forward a little bit and let’s talk about, you know, where things are today. So I noticed on your website there’s a lot of blogs and a lot of content related to composable concepts and MACH Alliance as well on your website.

So can you talk a little bit about what inriver sees in terms of the opportunity with composable architectures, you know, MACH, and maybe a little bit why inriver might be excited about that space? And how does the approach make sense even for brands as well to get access to those types of capabilities? Maybe even as it relates to DAMs as well as PIMs?

Johan Boström: Absolutely. I think it relates to all systems actually, regardless of domain. For us, this is a no-brainer approach. We’ve always had an API first approach. That’s been in our DNA since day one.

Our partners have always been able to build solutions [00:08:00] on top of inriver, so we always been kind of that platform also. And today, as we are a multi-tenant platform that are microservices-based, we are already MACH. We’ve been MACH for a long time. It’s just that the terminology is sort of new, but it’s not new for us.

One of the things that we’ve seen, of course, is that there’s more data that’s gotta go to more endpoints. And these endpoints, when we started off 15 years ago, we had a batch job running and it published a rendition of a catalog in all its assets, all the images and videos and so forth to a receiving system. Today we’re going off of that push model and into the pull model. So I’m saying we’re leaving the push economy and going into the pull economy. And that means that the PIM, which is also integrated to, for us on average seven systems, must be MACH compatible. It must have the ability to deliver near realtime data.

But that’s when [00:09:00] wherever you guys come in, because real time data is one piece of it, delivering JSON to some e-commerce engine. That’s not hard because it’s not that much data. It’s pretty slim when it comes to the data volume. But assets are big and big files are the ones that are the stuff that drags performance down, and that’s where you need the CDN capability, the content delivery network to speed things up.

You also need the fantastic transformation capabilities that Cloudinary has because you need to be able to dynamically transform these assets and that is why we partnered up with you guys and built it into our product as one of the core functionalities.

Gary Ballabio: Your story is also very similar to Cloudinary’s story with respect to, we were born as an API.

We were always there and you know, MACH got built around us and we were like, hey, we just fit right into this thing. This is great.

And I didn’t realize on average you connect to seven different systems. I mean, that’s an interesting statistic.

Johan Boström: We need to keep track of that and we need to [00:10:00] understand what the integration points are because if there’s frequent integrations with certain systems, let’s say SAP, it’s not something that should be done in every implementation for every customer. It should be dealt with by us. We should support that out of the box. Whilst if it’s an integration to a home brewed system, well there’s only one customer probably in the world that will use it and then it becomes a bespoke integration. But again, that needs to be simple. It needs to be fast so that we deliver time to value as well.

And so the need we have of delivering more integrations as well as our partners delivering integrations to our customers, it’s sort of the same need. And MACH is a very important piece of us being able to deal with that complexity that this integration creates cuz this ecosystem is growing.

It’s not like the integration points are becoming fewer. They’re just growing in numbers and complexity every day. So integration for us is really key, and we’re focused, laser focused on building better integrations.

Gary Ballabio: That’s interesting. I [00:11:00] mean, are you seeing that you’re connecting to more systems now than you were, you know, when the company was first started, and do you see that growing?

Johan Boström: Oh, yeah, for sure. Look, 15 years ago, we connected to an ERP system and we got some SKUs from the ERP. We dressed them up and we published to an e-commerce solution and maybe to a printed catalog. And that was basically it. Today, we get information from ERPs, PLMs, OMS solutions, suppliers. There’s so many sources. And when we talk about the publishing, it’s not only e-commerce and print anymore. It is point of sales solutions, product configurators, sales and service support systems, and of course syndication to Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy and all the other retailers and marketplaces and large distributors and MRO procurement providers and all of those.

So, it’s a channel explosion right now and it’s going to continue to explode. And thus this integration piece and being able to deliver near real time [00:12:00] data is crucial.

Gary Ballabio: I’m just thinking about how much more that is to manage and everything for all of our customers, right? Across all these systems, it’s incredible.

Johan Boström: Yeah, you look at it like a matrix. I mean, you have a product. That product might come in 10 variations. That variation comes in 10 different sizes per variation, and then you have your languages and all the other localization that you need to do times every channel that you have and all the channels will be different.

Some will want five images, some want three. Some require a video, some want a certain set of attributes, some want another set of attributes. Year over year, our data model, the number of attributes per product or per SKU grows 9%.

Gary Ballabio: Wow.

Johan Boström: And that’s of course gets compounded. So it is a pretty rapid growth. And that also goes for digital assets of course.

Gary Ballabio: Amazing. So let’s talk about the digital assets a little bit more. The way I like to describe things is that when we’re working with our customers, we’re always trying to drive that in-store experience, [00:13:00] but online. And today there’s product galleries. They incorporate a lot of static images, a lot of different angles, of course. But more and more companies are incorporating more richer assets, I guess I could say. So 3D, 360 spinners, demo videos, they’re trying to provide that much more, even be able to zoom in on a high resolution image as well, so you can see the threading for some items.

I’m just curious to get your take on brands incorporating and leveraging those types of assets. And also like how is inriver helping to support that and brands taking advantage of those types of assets?

Johan Boström: Very good question because it is one of the reasons that we like the partnership with you. Again, the number of assets are growing, but the complexity of the assets is growing also because 3D, AR, it’s rarely a file. It’s more of a database in its own right. It’s mesh models that are very complex to deal with.

The good thing about that modern kind of approach with 3D and [00:14:00] AR is that you also sort of get virtual photography as a part of that. So when you have an engineer or designer working in a computerated design program, you can quickly turn that into images, 360 spins and a lot of other assets.

It is also when you look at configurating stuff, if you configure, let’s say a sectional sofa, you will need a lot of images being dynamically put together when you change the legs on the sofa, when you change the sections, when you change the fabric, when you change the swatch on the fabric. When you change the legs from metal to wood, it needs to render so you can actually see it like it would be configured in your living room.

And that is also a main driver. We have a lot of furniture customers and they have been spearheading this. If you look at like Ethan Allen, I think they worked with augmented reality for five years now. And they were really, really ahead of the pack. Now I would say most of the furniture customers that we have are in some way, shape or [00:15:00] form doing 3D and AR and virtual photography.

Gary Ballabio: Yeah, IKEA also has a pretty great app when it comes to incorporating that type of experience too.

Johan Boström: Yes, yes. Being Swedes, they like efficiency. So they actually developed their own rendering engine back in the day together with the University of Lund in Sweden. So most of the images that we’ve seen on IKEA catalogs and IKEA websites have been virtually put together for a great many years, because of the fact that it’s expensive and it takes a lot of time to build these environments. You gotta put the kitchen up there, right? And in some cases, you want people in the room. In some cases, you don’t. In some cases, you sell green kitchens, and in other cases, you only sell brown ones.

So you can’t build all of those configurable products together and take photos of them. You just can’t, it’s not possible if you have, like I think Ethan Allen had 3 billion permutations of the sectional sofa. You can’t take 3 billion pictures. There’s no way you can. So you need to be able to do it [00:16:00] dynamically, and that’s where this technology comes into play.

Gary Ballabio: Certainly would be Cloudinary’s favorite customer if you had 3 billion images, for sure. We would love to help with that.

Johan Boström: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It would be inriver’s favorite too. It’s still one of my favorite customers though. But yeah, the fact is that there’s a need to configure materials, even in the consumer goods sector sometimes.

And you can see that now. Your configurable sneakers, configurable sofas, everything’s configurable today. Consumers want choice. That’s why this complexity grows. But with this complexity, of course, comes solutions such as our joint solution to help out and see that that process becomes effective.

Gary Ballabio: It is interesting. It kind of touches on the next question a little bit. So just in, in terms of brands, they have their e-commerce store, that’s their main channel to their end customers. And they have other marketplaces that they’re going through, but curious to hear about what channels that you are hearing or seeing that are growing in popularity or importance for brands out there. How does that relate to some of the strategies or approaches that they’re taking? There’s a [00:17:00] lot of angles that they can be looking at, but I’m curious to hear like what you’re seeing. And what are they doing to capture the attention of consumers across some of these different channels that they could be using?

Johan Boström: I’ve written quite a few blog posts about this topic, and one of the things that unfortunately is happening for brands is that the transparency of the internet, the search engines and the marketplaces, actually ends up with a consumer that is less focused on brand and more focused on searching for product properties. Even strong brands will have a hard time capturing their audience as they start their buying journey with a search. And they’re not searching for Pampers baby wipes, they’re searching for baby wipes. And thus the no brand baby wipes can actually pop up early in the search result too.

So brands need to focus more on the content than ever before because that’s the only thing that they can use as a competitive advantage online. And when you have great content, you are likely to be [00:18:00] very visible on the marketplaces on Google, and of course not in retailers sites and so forth.

Being on page three of Amazon is not a good place to be. It’s not a good place to be at page three of Home Depot either if you sell do it yourself goods. So you gotta have that visibility regardless of how strong your brand is. So I think brand is still important. Brand is always going to be important.

We just discussed brands of watches before we started the recording, right? But it’s different to be Rolex than to be a brand selling do it yourself equipment. There’s a different affinity to the brand. From my perspective, as brand value is diminishing, brands need to focus more on their content, and they do. They actually do. And we have built in digital shelf analytics that can help brands stay on top. So they know that they can have the visibility on those third party sites that they can’t control, but where they can control the content. It’s the content. It was what differs from the ones that are on page [00:19:00] one and page three, and the ones that get the sale, the ones that have the conversion rate, are the ones with the best content that convinces the buyer to buy.

So all about content again.

Gary Ballabio: Yeah, so discoverability is one thing. So, making sure that you’re top in the rankings, but then, yeah, once you get in there, it has to be fast, it has to be dynamic, it has to be engaging as customized as possible. Um, yeah, certainly a lot of factors there.

Johan Boström: Yeah, for sure. And for the brands, this is really important, and I think most of the brands are starting to realize the importance of the content itself because again, it is the only thing that you actually sell online is your content. You’re in the content business when you go online. That’s just it.

Gary Ballabio: Yeah, it’s so important and it’s such a huge element of not only of the weight of the page, but also the experience to the end user. Great, great points.

So Johan, thank you so much for taking the time with us today.

And to the audience, please smash that like button and subscribe to get the [00:20:00] latest episodes of MX Matters and stay up to date with all things media experience. So thanks again.

Johan Boström: Thank you Gary.

Gary Ballabio: Thanks Johan.