SoftQuad Software, Ltd. announced a strategic technology partnership with ec-Content. The partnership will combine SoftQuad MarketAgility, a supply side e-catalog solution, with ec-Content’s ability to create enhanced catalog content, allowing suppliers to deliver customer-specific catalogs to e-markets quickly and efficiently. Suppliers who want to effectively participate in e-marketplaces must overcome the challenges involved in creating, updating and delivering content rich catalogs with buyer-specific pricing information to multiple e-marketplaces. This requires collecting product and pricing information from enterprise systems, adding up-to-date product descriptions and graphics from manufacturers, and delivering each e-catalog in the XML format required by each e-marketplace. The combination of MarketAgility and ec-Content will provide suppliers with an integrated solution to rapidly create buyer-specific catalogs, normalize the data for consistency, enrich it with manufacturer information, and distribute it to e-markets. For suppliers, this enables them to bring their customized e-catalogs online quickly. For e-marketplace users, this ensures a rich buying experience by enabling them to quickly and efficiently find the products they need with accurate product and pricing information. ec-Content maintains a base of product information on over five million individual items from thousands of manufacturers, and provides management and maintenance services to expand and update this information for marketplaces and suppliers. ec-Content enhances suppliers’ catalog content by overlaying it with manufacturers’ comprehensive and current product information. ec-Content’s high quality e-catalog libraries are then published in the required format to each e-marketplace. www.ec-content.com, www.softquad.com