A2i Announces Support for Automotive Parts Catalogs; Enhances xCat to Support Product Applications and Application-Based Search

    LOS ANGELES--June 14, 2001--A2i Inc., the leading provider of next-generation content management and catalog publishing systems, today announced that its xCat(TM) electronic catalog system now supports product applications.
    Coupled with flexible, application-based search, this capability allows the A2i xCat system to address the demanding requirements of the automotive aftermarket industry, where application-based search is the norm.
    A product application is a particular use of a product. Application-based search provides yet another way to locate products within a large catalog, so that in addition to drill-down search by manufacturer, category, attributes, keyword, and other traditional criteria, a user can also search for products by their application.
    Applications are especially important in industries where application-driven product selection is the traditional way to locate products within a large catalog of complex product information. For example, in the automotive parts business, customers typically select parts based not on the category or manufacturer but rather on the particular year, make, model and engine type of the vehicle. There are millions of parts, tens of thousands of different vehicles, and since each part can be used in more than one vehicle, tens of millions of applications.
    The A2i xCat system features an innovative data model for product applications that: (1) completely eliminates the duplication of both product data and application data typical of previous systems; (2) efficiently enforces validation against the table of valid applications; and (3) is radically more efficient for storage and searching. For example, an automotive parts catalog that historically contained over twenty million application records is represented within an xCat catalog with just over one million parts records and forty thousand vehicle specification records.
    In addition to applications and application-based search, xCat also supports the ability to add very rich product content -- such as pictures, diagrams, specifications, repair information and text -- not only to the parts themselves but also to the vehicles and applications. This cannot be done in existing application-based catalogs because of the unmanageable duplication of data and links, and the exponential growth of the data file that would occur as a result.
    "Support for product applications and application-based search within xCat complements the blazingly fast performance and omnidirectional drill-down and keyword search characteristic of all A2i catalogs," said Paul Weinberg, president and CEO of A2i. "Add in our efficient data model that eliminates all data duplication and enforces data integrity, and xCat overcomes the shortcomings and rigidity of existing systems to offer the best of all possible worlds to the automotive aftermarket industry."

    About A2i Inc.

    A2i develops and markets a content management and catalog publishing system that supports simultaneous publishing to the Web, paper, and CD-ROM from a single data source, and efficiently manages catalogs containing from thousands to millions of items. A2i customers include many of the largest industrial distributors in the United States, such as Applied Industrial Technologies, Airgas and Ferguson Enterprises; GE Appliances; RS Components in England; as well as a variety of exchanges and other publishers of large printed and electronic catalogs. Founded in 1993, the company has engineers in Los Angeles and Israel. For more information, visit www.a2i.com.