KnowledgeBase - Scale creation of multi-vendor designs

The scalability challenge

Sales methods that don’t scale will kill profitability. The pre-sales process needs to be repeatable, efficient, accurate, and fast. It can’t rely on knowledge in the minds of individual designers or salespeople nor, with competitive pressures, is there time to do the research.

Automatically incorporate vendor data and your best practices

Without Netformx tools, to create a solution that incorporates multiple vendors’ products, designers would need to access each manufacturer or distributor’s tools and develop configurations from each without seeing the total picture. That disjointed effort is very dependent on the individual designer’s experience and expertise and may not take advantage of bundle opportunities or maximize rebates or discounts. The designer may not have the time or knowledge to pursue economic trade-offs, stay up to date with the company’s best practices, or take advantage of excess inventory. The choices they make to create the proposal may be best or easiest for them but may not be best for the overall business.

Vendor information at your fingertips

Netformx makes it easy to access the Netformx KnowledgeBase™, a comprehensive database of content from multiple vendors that is consumed by Netformx applications so you can create multi-vendor designs with a single tool.

Many millions of data points available

Vendor and distributor data can include products, services, configuration rules, reference architectures, replacements, program compliance, promotions, certifications, and prices, as well as suggested product substitutions that reduce excess inventory or increase discounts and rebates. The KnowledgeBase currently contains more than 21 million SKUS. The data model supports an extensive knowledge base of routes and rules, parent-child relationships, component attributes, pricing, images, number of ports, power consumption and many more.

Netformx DesignXpert® is built on the Netformx KnowledgeBase.

With the Netformx KnowledgeBase you can:

• Access vendor data to create end-to-end solutions that are multi-vendor, all from the same platform
• Ensure accurate and validated designs
• Automatically satisfy vendor interoperability rules and attributes, resulting in validated graphical solutions
• Have easy access to validation and configuration rules and up-to-date product and service catalogs from multiple manufacturers
• See multi-vendor and cross-vendor relationships between components, such as associating specific headsets with specific phones
• Incorporate product or service catalog content for distributors and your company