Brad Husick

CPExchange offers a vendor-neutral, open standard for facilitating the privacy-enabled interchange of customer information across disparate enterprise applications and systems. The CPExchange standard integrates online and offline customer data in an XML-based data model for use within various enterprise applications both on and off the Web. The result is a networked, customer-focused environment that allows e-businesses to leverage a unified view of their customers into more compelling e-relationships. More than simply a DTD or XML tag set, CPExchange will include a data model, transport and query definitions, and a framework for enabling privacy safeguards

Few of today's supply and demand chains share a unified image of the customer, leaving customer support, order management, lead sharing and other primary business functions working independently to grasp a customer's identity, behavior and needs. Customer service capability is severely reduced by this lack of shared information, creating significant and redundant short and long-term IT integration costs.

Businesses will be able to apply CPExchange across a disparate range of back-office applications, front-office applications and Web customer automation applications. While the benefits of a singular customer view are growing increasingly apparent within an enterprise, CPExchange solutions will prove vital in tomorrow's world of connected enterprises. The CPExchange working group intends to develop an open-source reference implementation and developer guidelines to speed adoption of CPExchange among vendors.