Office Depot Selects Cardonet for Custom Catalog Creation and Syndication

June 12, 2003 -- SANTA CLARA, CA -- Cardonet, Inc., a provider of advanced product information management solutions for medium to large enterprises, has announced that Office Depot, the world’s largest seller of office products and a recognized leader in e-commerce, has selected Cardonet’s Product Master software to streamline the process of creating and syndicating custom electronic product catalogs.

Office Depot creates hundreds of custom versions of its catalog with full text, descriptions and images for distribution to key customers each month. By deploying Cardonet’s automated software, Office Depot expects to save time and money by improving its product data aggregation and quality assurance processes. Office Depot is using the Cardonet solution to support its existing base of e-commerce customers as well as to manage its product feeds to search engines and portals.

"Our goal is to be both responsive to our customers and to make it simple for our customers to find our products while searching the Internet," said Monica Luechtefeld, Office Depot EVP for Global ECommerce.

"In choosing Cardonet over a considerable field of competitors, we expect to dramatically streamline the way to do e-business with many of our largest customers and online partners," added Barbara Zaborowski, ECommerce Customer Integration Manager for Office Depot. "These customers require timely product data in a format suited to their unique content and technical needs and delivered according to their schedules. With Cardonet we’ve found a tool that helps us to meet challenges like this in a timely and efficient manner."

Cardonet employs a rules-driven approach that allows Office Depot to easily assemble custom catalogs by sourcing information from the company’s master catalog of more than 115,000 products. Each catalog is then customized to accommodate the unique requirements of Office Depot’s customers regarding product subsets, product classifications, special pricing, and other factors.

With over 1,000 customer implementations, Office Depot is the industry leader in 3rd party software partner integrations. Maintaining eCatalogs for these external interfaces efficiently was the reason for selecting the Cardonet tool.

"E-commerce is becoming increasingly important for distributors as a key revenue channel, and companies must be able to efficiently respond to requests for e-catalogs or run the risk of losing business to their competitors," said Itay Meiri, CEO and co-founder of Cardonet. "By choosing Cardonet, Office Depot gains the flexibility to rapidly grow their e-commerce initiative without having to increase their internal staffing. "

The flexible architecture of Cardonet is allowing Office Depot to automate the catalog distribution process based on channel-specific format requirements, delivery preferences and syndication schedules. Data can be output in virtually any format to support different e-procurement systems and trading platforms used by their customers and in popular e-marketplaces.

About Office Depot
No one sells more office products to more customers in more countries than Office Depot. The Company operates under the Office Depot®, Viking Office Products®, Viking Direct® and 4Sure.com® brand names. As of March 29, 2003, Office Depot operated 871 office supply superstores in the United States and Canada, in addition to a national business-to-business delivery network supported by 24 delivery centers, more than 60 local sales offices and 13 regional call centers. Furthermore, the Company sells products and services in 20 countries outside of the United States and Canada, including 38 office supply stores in France, one in Spain and 12 in Japan that are owned and operated by the Company; and 123 additional office supply stores under joint venture and licensing agreements operating under the Office Depot® name in seven foreign countries.

The Company also operates an award-winning U.S. Office Depot brand web site at www.officedepot.com where customers can access Office Depot’s low competitive prices seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. The Company also operates more than 30 other web sites in the U.S. and 13 international countries including: Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Japan, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

About Cardonet, Inc.
Founded in 1997 and headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., Cardonet, Inc., (www.cardonet.com) is a leading provider of product information management solutions used by medium to large enterprises to streamline their business processes. Cardonet’s rules-driven automation technology and advanced process-oriented workflows, provide both buy-side and sell-side organizations with powerful solutions for developing, managing, and distributing rich electronic databases of product information. Privately held, Cardonet’s primary investors include Cargill, Giza GE Capital, Intel Capital, Sequoia Capital, Yozma Venture Capital and Mentor Capital Group.