The Customer Profile Exchange Network (CPExchange) launched the newly authored Customer Profile Exchange standard, which creates a standard for privacy-enabled customer data interchange. The CPExchange Network, a volunteer consortium made up of over 70 e-business organizations, is offering a vendor-neutral, open standard for exchanging privacy-enabled customer information across different businesses and computer systems. Organizations with many different and separate data sources who are seeking an integrated view of customers — such as suppliers and employees — will utilize CPExchange. CPExchange facilitates the management and promotion of customer relationships, while profiling customer information — appealing to all industry sectors. Few of today’s supply and demand chains share a unified profile of the customer, leaving customer support, order management, lead sharing and other primary business functions working independently to grasp a customer’s identity, behaviors and needs. Customer service capability is severely reduced by this lack of shared information, creating significant short and long-term IT integration costs. Customers gain a unified profile of their situation among their suppliers, enjoy better customer service, and reduce the time and complexity of interacting with companies. Significantly, it will allow customers to more easily achieve the levels of privacy they require when handling sensitive and proprietary profile information. The CPExchange Network is hosted by the International Digital Enterprise Alliance (IDEAlliance), a non-profit, vendor-neutral organization dedicated to the development and implementation of open interoperability standards. Membership in the CPExchange Network is open to any and all contributors on an annual fee basis. www.cpexchange.org