Inovis has unveiled Inovis Image Exchange Services, a digital media support system that combines product pictures and text in a way that ensures accuracy and reduces costs for retailers and their trading partners.

Inovis Image Exchange Services links basic images with product-item data in the Inovis Catalogue, allowing retailers to verify that the correct base image or set of images is attached at the product-item level. This new service offering also leverages Inovis Catalogue Web Services functionality to provide a link for images to any external application that requires a product image.

Image Exchange Services represents an expanded functionality of the Inovis Catalogue, the industry's largest product data synchronization resource for retailers, with more than 115 million product items online. With Inovis' expanded image-exchange functionality, retailers can download standardized images from suppliers and combine text with pictures in a way that eliminates redundancies and allows for better brand and product management. Because stored images are synchronized with the appropriate product attribute data, retailers and their suppliers can search for a specific product visual by image and product attributes.

"Image data is the retail industry's 'next frontier' for product information," said Erik Huddleston, vice president of strategic applications, product management, at Inovis. "With our new digital image exchange system, Inovis is giving retailers the power to marry product text and pictures throughout the supply chain in a comprehensive, standardized, and easy-to-download format."

The new image-exchange support system is the first value-added application release for Inovis Catalogue 4.13, the latest data synchronization platform upgrade for the retail industry. The new technology offering includes a data structure that accommodates standard and non-standard file formats, scalable data-storage schema with high capacity, and digital media uploads and downloads with direct integration via IBM MQ or standard Web Services.

About Inovis

Inovis is a leading provider of on-demand business community management solutions that empower companies to transact, collaborate, and optimize communications with their business partners. Companies can dramatically reduce the complexity and cost of supply chain management by automating communication with entire trading communities. With this foundation of high-quality and reliable connectivity, companies can improve visibility into interactions with business partners that delivers actionable intelligence that allows users to proactively address supply chain issues before they impact profitability.

With more than 20 years of expertise, Inovis delivers its products and services to more than 20,000 companies over a wide range of industries and markets across the globe.

For more information, visit http://www.inovis.com/, or the Inovis Community Blog.