promoOrder.com/PPAI to Develop DW for $15B Industry

promoOrder.com and Promotional Products Association International (PPAI) announced an agreement in principle to jointly develop a massive data warehouse for the $15 billion promotional products industry.

Austin-based promoOrder.com is an ASP (application service provider) and exchange to the promotional products industry. The company builds and hosts client virtual company stores -- on behalf of promotional products distributors -- distributor Web sites, and supplier sites.

The data warehouse will contain product images and product information on hundreds of thousands of promotional products. The data and images will then be made available, either in its entirety or in segments, to e-distributors and distributor companies. It can also be used by suppliers to maintain and update their own product data.

"Suppliers are being asked to provide data and a wide variety of information to digital and traditional companies," said Steve Slagle, president and CEO of PPAI. "This data warehouse will give our industry suppliers a single location to deliver and update data. It makes life a lot easier for every supplier."

According to promoOrder.com president and CEO Mike Linderman, "assembling huge amounts of data is a massive and costly undertaking for any individual distributor or e-distributor. This will give everyone an opportunity to obtain slices of data, large or small, at a much lower cost than they would be able to do as individual companies."

The joint announcement outlined the details of the agreement in which PPAI and promoOrder.com will jointly own and finance the data warehouse. The warehouse will operate under the standards developed by e-PromoStandards Alliance (e-PSA), the industry's standards alliance.

Linderman said promoOrder has pledged to follow the standards developed by e-PSA. "Having a large group of companies working together to develop standards is the best approach for broad acceptance of digital standards. We have to work together to set standards that are acceptable to everyone, large and small," he said.

In addition to the data warehouse, the two organizations also reached an agreement for PPAI to help market promoOrder e-commerce services to PPAI members. Under the terms of the agreement PPAI members will receive special, reduced pricing for promoOrder.com e-commerce services.

Contact Angie West of promoOrder.com, 512-439-2810, angie@promoOrder.com, Websites: www.smartpromo.com, www.promoorder.com.