Executive Summary

Product Information Management Platform

Products and services are the foundation of every organization, regardless of its industry or size. Across all channels and departments, nearly every interaction relates to answering questions or gaining access to product information. Every organization must ensure that products get the attention they deserve as they are marketed, sold, serviced and enhanced to meet customer expectations. A “customer-first” mentality is critical and not unreasonable. Still, in a rush to be the most cost-effective, business leaders too often forget that product experiences are key to satisfying and retaining customers.

The ability to invest adequate time and resources into products determines an organization’s agility, sustainability, operational effectiveness and overall business health. Successful product experiences require technology investments like product information management (PIM) to ensure the proper support of interactions and the underlying life cycle that enables impactful and interactive communication with customers. To accomplish this requires an agreed-upon standard of product information that should be readily available for any purpose, including AI use cases. By 2027, one-quarter of enterprises will re-activate a new product information management software investment to meet GenAI requirements to have an ingestible product catalog for interactions across the supply chain.

ISG Research defines PIM as the methods and processes for managing and using product information with applications and processes across the front office; customer and revenue areas of marketing, sales and commerce; customer and field service; and the back office. This also applies to the supply chain—from manufacturing and distribution to financial accounting. As enterprises increase the number and diversity of products and services offered to customers and partners, it’s critical to address limitations in the ways product information is managed and distributed, including the administration of related attributes and content that describes the products.

At the same time, competitive pressures require that enterprises quickly incorporate large amounts of new content—video and images, for example—while ensuring that the information presented to customers is accurate, operational processes run uninterrupted and timely data is available for business analysis. For environments where consumers, suppliers and partners use multiple channels to access product information—websites, kiosks, smartphones, tablets—it is essential that the organization must present complete, up-to-date product information to inspire interest and facilitate purchases.

PIM—and the applications and technology that enable it—help organizations provide the best possible product information for processes, departments and partners. To accomplish this, PIM software must support multiple business roles, including product managers and marketers, operations and manufacturing teams and those in the supply chain. Manufacturers, for example, must be able to share product information with distributors and direct retailers or digital commerce providers.

Effectively managed product information is also essential to support operational and decision-making processes.

Effectively managed product information is also essential to support decision-making processes. Analytics applied to product information can yield a variety of metrics—indicating where product information is missing, where it needs to be improved, the patterns of product usage and the meaning of feedback received. Analytics can help profile and improve data quality and associated attributes to determine where action is needed.

PIM is not the same as master data management (MDM), although the two are sometimes confused. This misunderstanding can distract enterprises from focusing on the needs of product processes. MDM technology can ensure a single definition of data across the enterprise and improve the quality and integration of data across information systems. PIM systems must have MDM built in and connect to the data integration and quality processes to ensure only one defined master record exists for any given product.

However, product information encompasses more than just the defined name and attributes of a product in a database. It also includes related information, such as digital assets and documents needed for reference or compliance purposes. Enterprises should take care to understand the differences between PIM and MDM and how these systems complement one another to inform decisions. PIM is essential to enable business units to manage product-related processes, just as IT staff need broader MDM technology and integration tools to manage data throughout the enterprise.

PIM as a software category has existed for decades. It operates independently and also interoperates with enterprise software. The platform category of PIM meets the specific needs of particular users, including digital merchandising to support online marketplaces and exchanges of information across suppliers, manufacturers and retailers. Beyond the traditional management of product information, the software category has evolved to support product life cycles and the activation and deactivation across channels that distribute or market products.

Today’s enterprises must manage a continually expanding array of data, content and digital assets while satisfying consumer demands for comprehensive product information. Addressing these challenges requires unified processes, automated systems and, importantly, the ability to augment and enrich product information. We find that most organizations have incompatible tools and must cope with disparate forms of data that lead to inefficiency and time wasted checking for errors and reconciling data across systems.

To provide an effective product experience for buyers, consumers, customers and partners across the entire supply chain, enterprises must deliver accurate, consistent and actionable product information. Crucially, it is impossible to deliver the best customer experience without a great product experience, and successful organizations recognize this is a key benefit realized from PIM investments. PIM enhances visibility into—and engagement with—product information and can help organizations increase revenue and satisfy customers.

Managing product information can be challenging when an enterprise and its workers use different names, attributes, images and related product information for the same purpose. Disparities often exist across departments. Additionally, organizations regularly add suppliers to business networks and increase the number and variety of products offered without utilizing already defined and agreed-upon product information. Today’s customers also expect a delightful product experience that provides information on mobile devices, but conducting commerce across sites and social media introduces challenges for a unified experience. Perhaps most importantly, product information today must have a visual component, from images and video to social ratings and reviews.

These advances bring additional content and data into an enterprise’s information systems, introducing new inconsistencies in how products and attributes are combined. Still, competitive pressures require up-to-date and accurate information that is also engaging in its presentation—in other words, an effective product experience. Enterprises need systems that enable intelligent processes to run continuously and uninterrupted and use AI machine learning with analytics to identify issues and opportunities to exploit the power of product information. Analytics provide insight into the use of product information and where collaborative actions are necessary for improvement. However, the advancing aspects of agentic AI to help machines interact with workers and consumers through workflows are becoming even more important. Through 2028, one-fifth of enterprises will have connected a product information network with agentic AI supporting the enterprise and customers’ requirements for responsiveness.

In most organizations, product information is spread across websites, applications, digital asset management systems, databases, spreadsheets and a variety of applications. Each system can uniquely present the information, resulting in disparate product experiences. A related issue is the difficulty of exchanging, integrating and synchronizing product information across diverse systems and services used by buyers, customers and business partners. Typically, this occurs outside enterprise systems and in cloud computing environments such as digital commerce, marketplaces and CRM systems.

In most organizations, product information is spread across websites, applications, digital asset management systems, databases, spreadsheets and a variety of applications. Each system can uniquely present the information, resulting in disparate product experiences. A related issue is the difficulty of exchanging, integrating and synchronizing product information across diverse systems and services used by buyers, customers and business partners. Typically, this occurs outside enterprise systems and in cloud computing environments such as digital commerce, marketplaces and CRM systems.

ISG believes a methodical approach is essential to maximize competitiveness. Improving the performance of your enterprise’s people, processes, information and technology components requires selecting the right software provider and product. Technology updates alone are not enough to improve the use of PIM in an organization. Doing so requires a balanced set of upgrades and efforts to enhance processes and information.

It is best to start by assessing all short- and long-term efforts related to the product experience and any existing PIM approach. Enterprises should cultivate product information that encourages buyer and customer engagement. Key touchpoints include the physical world and digital systems like commerce and websites with products, services and subscriptions to bolster interactive experiences. This approach requires more intelligent, streamlined and automated product information processes, freeing responsible parties to focus on areas that need immediate improvement, be it velocity, volume of interest, sales or outdated product information.

Product success is about increasing effectiveness in digital engagement and bringing new value to the process.

Product success is more than just merchandising and maintaining product information on a digital shelf. The goal is to increase productivity and sustain those efforts in the best and worst of times, ensuring success under pressure and over the long term. Product success is about increasing effectiveness in digital engagement and bringing new value to the process. Applications should do more than enhance productivity in managing product information and provide insights into usage such as product activation, new product introduction and end of life.

The product experience unifies an enterprise’s efforts to sustain continuity while bringing new value to digital merchandising and marketing efforts, helping exceed customer expectations. Optimizing the product experience is more than just a nicety—it is essential for every organization that looks to make the most of customer engagement and relationships. This effort is vital when relying on digital commerce to sell products and services. Without an optimized product experience, an organization will not successfully elevate the customer experience.

Continuous improvement is a shared responsibility across business and IT leadership, and impossible to do without PIM designed to optimize the product experience. This approach is separate from MDM technology or goals for achieving better data integration. Antiquated methods such as spreadsheets, databases and other ERP, CRM or digital commerce systems are not always designed for a contemporary digital product experience. These options can decrease productivity, diminish accountability and increase risk. Enterprises must use business continuity as a driver of investments to improve the intelligent use of PIM, especially in times of duress.

Enterprises should optimize underlying product processes and technology for internal use, and buyers and customers, suppliers and partners. This can have an immediate impact on top- and bottom-line results and reflects the priority an organization places on product experience. Enterprises should ensure that existing and future PIM technology investments are designed for effective engagement and a fantastic product experience, not just for automation and efficiency. Organizations need only look at how they manage prices and the related promotions for revenue management.

Enterprises must effectively manage and improve product information outside of organizational channels and systems to ensure accuracy and consistency across the entire enterprise’s efforts. This approach enables organizations to more effectively align products to specific activities and processes. It requires applications that allow an organization to manage product information for an effective digital experience. The benefits of using dedicated PIM technology can be significant. Organizations find PIM helps eliminate data errors, improves cross-sell and up-sell opportunities and enhances the customer experience through consistent product information.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for PIM Platforms evaluates the software providers and products in support of functional areas, including catalog management, business, content management infrastructure, data management infrastructure, digital asset management, digital innovation, enterprise, integration-specific needs, industry standard, the product life cycle and the ability to demonstrate alignment to benefits. The results also encompass provisions for management and manager-specific needs, product manager, product-specific management, analyst and administrative-specific needs and investment. This comprehensive capability framework supports the broad requirements for PIM across industries and the needs of business and IT. To be evaluated in this Buyers Guide, products must include a platform that supports business and IT needs across channels to view product information.

This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of PIM as we define it: 1WorldSync, Acquia, Akeneo, Bluestone PIM, Boyum IT, censhare, Comosoft, Contentserv, fabric, Feedonomics, IBM, Informatica, inriver, insightsoftware, Netcore Unbxd, novomind, Oracle, Pimcore, Plytix, Precisely, Productsup, Propel Software, SAP, Sales Layer, Salsify, Stibo Systems, Syndigo and Viamedici.

Buyers Guide Overview

For over two decades, ISG Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. We have designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirements in any enterprise. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to rating software providers in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an enterprise.

ISG Research has designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of business requirements in any enterprise.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for PIM Platform is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for PIM platform software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. An effective product and customer experience with a provider can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment.

In this Buyers Guide, ISG Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of Capability, we applied the ISG Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for PIM to a manufacturing enterprise’s requirements.

The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of manufacturing-related PIM technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its full performance potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of software providers that does not represent a best fit for your enterprise.

ISG Research believes that an objective review of software providers and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of manufacturing-related PIM software and applications. An enterprise’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge manufacturing enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating PIM systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology. 

How To Use This Buyers Guide

Evaluating Software Providers: The Process

We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes.

1. Define the business case and goals.
   Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. 
2. Specify the business needs.
   Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology.
3. Assess the required roles and responsibilities.
   Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. 
4. Outline the project’s critical path.
   What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. 
5. Ascertain the technology approach.
Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. 
6. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria.
Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. 
7. Evaluate and select the technology properly.
Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products.
8. Establish the business initiative team to start the project.
Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources. 
   
   

The Findings

All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a software provider are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your enterprise’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software.

Factors beyond features and functions or software provider assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an enterprise may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one provider or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of software providers and products to your specific needs.

Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories

The research finds Informatica atop the list, followed by Akeneo, inriver and Salsify. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Informatica has done so in seven categories; inriver in three; Akeneo, Oracle and Salsify in two; and Bluestone PIM, Contentserv, Pimcore, SAP and Syndigo in one category.

The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.

The research places software providers into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies providers’ overall weighted performance.

Exemplary: The categorization and placement of software providers in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Akeneo, Bluestone PIM, Contentserv, Informatica, inriver, Oracle, Pimcore, Salsify, SAP, Stibo Systems and Syndigo.

Innovative: The categorization and placement of software providers in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: Acquia, Netcore Unbxd and Viamedici.

Assurance: The categorization and placement of software providers in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Boyum IT, IBM and insighsoftware.

Merit: The categorization of software providers in Merit (lower left) represents those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The providers rated Merit are: 1WorldSync, censhare, Comosoft, fabric, Feedonomics, novomind, Plytix, Precisely, Productsup, Propel Software and Sales Layer.

We warn that close provider placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every enterprise or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how enterprises handle PIM platform, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one software provider’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular enterprise’s needs.

We advise enterprises to assess and evaluate software providers based on organizational requirements and use this research as a supplement to internal evaluation of a provider and products.

Product Experience

The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with an enterprise’s life cycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent an enterprise’s requirements but how the provider operates. As more software providers orient to a complete product experience, evaluations will be more robust.

The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, of the overall rating using the specific underlying weighted category performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Usability (10%), Capability (30%), Reliability (12.5%), Adaptability (15%) and Manageability (12.5%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. Informatica, Akeneo and Salsify were designated Product Experience Leaders.

Customer Experience

The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire life cycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. Technology providers that have chief customer officers are more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring this commitment is made abundantly clear on the website and in the buying process and customer journey.

The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth, using the specific underlying weighted category performance as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are Validation (10%) and TCO/ROI (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research.

The software providers that evaluated the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are Informatica, inriver and Contentserv. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs.

Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide sufficient customer case studies to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience and an enterprise’s journey. The selection of a software provider means a continuous investment by the enterprise, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.

Appendix: Software Provider Inclusion

For inclusion in the ISG Buyers Guide™ for PIM Platform in 2025, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $10 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 50 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the past 12 months.

The product must provide PIM for enterprise processes and support product experiences for commerce and suppliers. This Buyers Guide evaluates critical areas like: analyst and administrative-specific requirements, business, catalog management, content management infrastructure, data management infrastructure, digital asset management, digital innovation, enterprise, integration-specific requirements, industry standard needs, management and manager-specific requirements, product life cycle, product manager, product-specific management, investment and demonstrating alignment to benefits.

The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.

All software providers that offer relevant PIM platform products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.

Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.

Products Evaluated

Providers of Promise

We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide but were above $5m US in revenue. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”