Atea Enhances Quality and Increases Productivity with CNET Channel's DataSource™

Atea, the leading Nordic company in sales, distribution and integration of IT products and IT infrastructure, offers a business concept that allows its customers to simplify and streamline the management of their IT products throughout the product life cycle. Despite a challenging Nordic market in 2002, Atea expanded significantly, and won market shares in several important segments, reinforcing its expertise as advisors and efficiency experts in the field of IT infrastructure.

Customer value is one of Atea's driving forces and providing its customers with comprehensive up-to-date information on IT equipment is key for Atea's online business. However, the company continuously has to deal with a growing number of products as well as frequent product updates, a challenge which motivated Atea to seek out an automated solution that would bring added value both to its customers and its internal organization. In 2001, Atea decided to outsource its catalog management  to CNET Channel.

"We offer our web shop as a preferred tool for our customers to help them gather information on IT equipment and assist them in making the smartest possible purchase decisions," said Ulrik Helming, e-business manager, Atea Denmark. "However, in order to satisfy our customers and remain competitive, we need to provide up-to-date comprehensive technical specifications. This was a tough challenge for us until we decided to implement CNET Channel's DataSource solution. The items we sell have a short life cycle and new products have to be added to our catalog every day, resulting in a huge amount of information that requires important resources to be efficiently managed. Our product managers used to manually collect and enter the product data into the database, a very time-consuming effort that prevented them from doing more valuable tasks."

DataSource, CNET Channel's product catalog maintenance service, transforms Atea's product portfolio into rich, granular, and standardized product data, Transactive Product DataT (TPDT), which is supplied over the Internet. The service includes initial catalog enrichment as well as a daily update of the customer's product catalog. The supplied TPD enables customers to support and build their Web sites' transactive functionalities, like product displaying, searching, comparing and configuring, and to build well informed and customized product information pages with product images, specifications, related products and more.

Scalability of DataSource a Major Driver for Atea's Selection

"We are always looking for high quality solutions that can add real value to our business and CNET Channel clearly offered a turn-key solution that perfectly fulfilled our high quality standards and met our needs from day one," commented Ulrik Helming. "The fact that the DataSource solution offers a large amount of product data in a structured format, that is easy to integrate into any database, is extremely important to us. In addition, the scalability of the solution facilitates future development and it has actually allowed us to expand the scope of our project to a Pan Nordic level."

By outsourcing its catalog management to CNET Channel, Atea was able to significantly enhance the management and maintenance of the important volume of product data made available through its web shop in Denmark, consequently lowering its operational costs by reducing the resources needed to maintain its online product data. CNET Channel's cost-effective solution has not only allowed Atea to improve its productivity but has also enabled the company to build a multi-vendor and well-informed purchase environment, giving customers access to quality product information as well as powerful search and comparison functionalities.

"Our strategy is to enter a business area with the ambition to become "best in class" and our e-business approach evidently follows the same strategy," declared Ulrik Helming. "Our web shop and electronic catalogs must have the best possible content  and CNET Channel definitely helps us to achieve this strategic goal."

Anders Nylund, sales manager CNET Channel Nordic countries, said: "We are very pleased to be Atea's outsourcing partner and to play a central strategic role in Atea's e-business development with our DataSource solution. It is not only imperative that IT industry players automate as many procedures as possible in order to develop a cost-efficient and competitive e-business environment but they also need to offer fast and reliable access to deeper and richer content, especially product specifications and CNET Channel's solutions will prove to be a cornerstone in this important phase."

CNET Channel's content-centric solutions are based on a unique database of technology product specifications containing over 1.5 million SKUs from more than 5,000 vendors in 40 markets and 12 languages.

About Atea

Atea is the leading Nordic company in sales, distribution and integration of IT products and IT infrastructure. Atea's business concept is to simplify and rationalize our customers? management of IT-products throughout the life cycle. * Atea group (Atea Holding AB) was legally founded 1 October 2001. Atea has 700 employees in the Nordic region. WM-data, the international venture capital company 3i and the management in Atea own Atea. CEO is Thomas Keifer. Atea's turnover in 2002 was 6061 MSEK.