SAP Bolsters NetWeaver's MDM Capabilities Part Two: xCat and SAP MDM

What xCat Offers

SAP NetWeaver, has become the main pillar of SAP AG's (NYSE: SAP) strategy to remake itself into a platform vendor. With this and mySAP Business Suite, the broadest suite of enterprise applications in the market, SAP will sell possibly everything from application servers via middleware to Web services (envisioned, in SAP's case, to orchestrate business processes by means of packaged composite applications across and atop existing systems). In mid-July, SAP announced that it has acquired substantially all of A2i, Inc. (www.a2i.com), a Los Angeles, California (US)-based an d privately held software company, which, since 1993 develops and markets xCat, the platform for enterprise-wide product content management (PCM) and cross-media catalog publishing, but with the touted simplicity and accessibility of desktop applications.

Therefore, SAP and A2i tout the following potent capabilities of xCat:

Powerful product content aggregation and cleansing, management and product information editing. The proper PCM system should do more than store data that once resided in another system. Instead, it must include powerful and extensive capabilities for loading, restructuring, cleansing, normalizing, and transforming source data from a variety of electronic sources, including text, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, Structured Query Language (SQL), and XML for both flat files and relational data.

Classification into a taxonomy with category-specific attributes. Not only must the proper PCM systems have a completely flexible schema, it must also support multiple classification schemes, user-defined taxonomy hierarchies of arbitrary depth with category-specific attributes, multiple simultaneous taxonomies, and "drag-and-drop" taxonomy editing capabilities that allow the taxonomy of the fully populated repository to be completely restructured and refined over time.

Intelligent image management. Any system can easily store an image as a binary large object (BLOB). By contrast, the proper PCM system must support intelligent image management with an understanding of all of the leading image formats, the ability to automatically transform images for different publishing purposes, and optimized high-performance image access and efficient image caching.

Integrated high-performance product search engine. Search mechanisms offered by traditional systems are not precise enough for searching product information. The full-fledged PCM system must hence include a fully integrated multidimensional search engine that is optimized for product search, with support not only for drill-down, parametric, and keyword search, but also measurement search, partial/contains search, and other types of search. To that end, the ability to let customers search for goods without knowing product codes has become the A2i's Web slogan: "No part number, no problem".

Performance acceleration, with scalability up to millions of products. Traditional enterprise applications, such as ERP or CRM, are not optimized for heavy search and access loads. Similarly, a traditional relational database management system (DBMS) is slow on typical searches against large repositories, so relying on the naked DBMS is also a problem. Therefore, a proper PCM system must have a self-optimizing performance acceleration layer that is able to quickly serve up product information to users and other enterprise applications.


Most catalog solutions are simple database applications that layer a thin veneer of functionality over SQL and they rely on SQL for all access to the data, whereby SQL works well with retrieving a single record from among thousands or even millions. Yet, to retrieve, for example, several thousand records from among a few million, and to limit across all of the different dimensions of the search for users to only see valid selections and valid values, that requires a multi-table join.


Also, to interactively browse and sort search results, requires cursors and temporary files, which can also cripples the performance of a SQL-based DBMS. An example is having thirty thousand bearings with very intricate relationships of which bearings can be sold with which other bearings. This requires a system to manage and automate those relationships. Thus, xCat uses SQL-based database—either Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2 or Oracle—only as a container to store the product information, but then xCat completely bypasses SQL for almost all access to the data—searching, sorting, querying, limiting, masking—and thus avoids the "four dirty words" of SQL: no cursors, no temporary files, no joins, and no views.

Cross-media publishing (web and paper or CD ROM print). The appropriate PCM system must drive all product content initiatives, including tightly integrated functionality not only for internal PCM, but also multichannel syndication, deployment of searchable Web catalogs, and print solutions for catalogs and other printed publications. The things that people expect in a paper catalog in terms of layout, structure, and tabular orientation of product records, should also be deliverable to the Web. Additionally, xCat can reportedly slice-and-dice a single master catalog containing several million products into as many customized virtual private, personalized, subset catalogs as necessary. Each slice looks like a complete catalog, either to the user on the Web or when published to paper.

Database-driven print catalogs. A full-fledged PCM system that supports print catalog publishing must do so in a way that is completely database-driven, meaning it "pushes" product information into the page layouts, rather than simply using the repository to store product information that was first entered directly into the page layout application.

UCCnet synchronization. A proper PCM system must support UCCnet synchronization, and also be able to syndicate product information to multiple audiences, transforming it into a variety of industry-standard and user-defined XML and delimited text formats, on an ad hoc and scheduled basis.

Integrated workflow engine. The system must have an integrated workflow engine that can provide a framework for managing product information in a collaborative environment, and can function standalone or in conjunction with external workflow applications and systems.

Cross-platform compatibility as elaborated above; and

Enterprise scalability. The appropriate PCM system must offer an n-tier architecture, capable of easily integrating with various deployment architectures, including a full suite of security and encryption services as well as ability to integrate with leading user directories, such as Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). Finally, the PCM system must provide master/slave capabilities to enable a global 24/7 deployment consisting of both staging and publishing servers.

SOURCE;http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/sap-bolsters-netweaver-s-mdm-capabilities-part-two-xcat-and-sap-mdm-17647/