What is CiEX?

CI Exchange (CiEX) is a data platform that enables high-fidelity data exchange between participants in the CiEX community.  A high-fidelity data exchange describes and validates itself, allowing for accurate and reliable data exchange.  High-fidelity is achieved through communal agreement and enforcement of strongly typed objects that represent important abstractions among participants.  Instead of exchanging weakly typed data feeds, participants exchange strongly typed communal items, such as product types, price types, etc.

Why CiEX?

Today, a large majority of ecommerce data exchange is done through data feeds sent via FTP protocol. While this is a relatively simple and easy way to transmit and exchange data, FTP data feeds are often times unreliable and error prone.

Here are some of the common reasons why feed-based FTP transfers are problematic:

• Stale Data: Yesterday’s data is sent tomorrow. By the time a data feed is created, sent to its destination, ingested by the recipient and put in a usable state, the data is already stale.

• Low Visibility: The sender of a data feed has no idea when the recipient has ingested the feed or how the data within the feed was used in the recipient’s system.

• Low Data Fidelity: The data within a feed is not self describing and requires manual verification. It is very easy for the sender to provide poorly formatted or semantically invalid data that the recipient’s system cannot understand. There is no simple way to verify that the expected data matches the expected format without each recipient creating complex verification algorithms.

• Low Scheduling Fidelity:  It is difficult for the sender to understand which version of a data point within a feed is being utilized by the recipient at any point in time. For example, a sender places a file on an FTP site every day at 7AM and the recipient picks up files from that FTP location every day at 6AM. The sender most likely assumes that their 7AM file is the latest file the recipient is using each day when in reality because of the scheduling differences today’s data is never reviewed and process until tomorrow.

• No Acknowledgment: FTP is the equivalent to dropping a file in a folder on someone’s desk while they are out of their office. There is no immediate acknowledgement that the data was received, much less utilized.

How does CiEX work?

Common Language

Legacy Systems

Work Flow

Interested in becoming a CiEX participant or want more information? Please send an email to CiEXInfo@channelintelligence.com.

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