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Business Information 3.0: Building
Quality Business Content from the Web |
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25 March 2007 |
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Companies such as Zoominfo and Generate are using
born-on-the-Web content and technologies to create business
information services that are several notches above
previous efforts to glean quality information from Web
sites and other key sources. With an emphasis on analytics
and semantic processing and business plans that are
targeted towards the meat of traditional business
information markets you could say that Business Information
3.0 has been born. Are traditional vendors ready to take on
these well-funded BI 3.0 challengers? |
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Business information services
provide profiles of companies, people and industry news
that have been a staple enterprise purchase for decades.
From sales to strategy-setters accurate and well-organized
business information is the key oftentimes to understanding
market opportunities and competitors with speed and accuracy
that can be turned into revenues. Traditionally
this has meant building central databases on-phone interviews, public records-checking and other
labor-intensive procedures. While many business information
services supplement their content with sweeps of Web sources
none have taken a Web-first approach to business information
content collection.
But the balance for business information services is
beginning to tip rapidly towards web-based content sourcing. No, the likes of
Factiva,
Hoover's,
InfoUSA/OneSource,
Lexis/Nexis,
and others are not going to sink into the ocean any time soon -
in fact, even as these services maintain the broadest business
content available they are major instigators of integrating Web
content into their business information services. Yet as more
and more businesses make their public Web sites the "golden
source" for their business profiles and public announcements a
new generation of services is evolving to take advantage of
that content to provide higher value-add business information
services.
Zoominfo has been
plugging away at building high-value business information from
Web sources for several years, amassing profiles on more than 3
million businesses and 34 million professionals. The accuracy
of Web content mined by Zoominfo has been questioned by some in
the past but new semantic processing software about to be
launched along with a powerful new interface promises to kick
up the quality of quality of Zoominfo's its ad-based and
subscription-based services substantially.
Making more sense of Web content and structuring it on the
fly to make it highly usable to online professionals is also
the portfolio of
Generate,
a Maynard, Massachusetts-based startup that is using Web-based
information and other sources to build high-end business
intelligence services for strategy and sales specialists and
key media alliances. Generate's patented semantic processing
doesn't just mine relationship data and information: it
identifies key types of business opportunity triggers visible
through that processing to give executives a leg up on who to
call for what reason.
Most significantly, Generate's enterprise-oriented products
are relatively pricey: be prepared to pay four-figure annual
subscription rates for their intelligence capabilities. With
services like Generate cultivating high-end business
information clients in highly targeted verticals and services
such as Zoominfo targeting general sales and marketing needs
across business and subscription and ad-supported services
there's a pincer movement of sorts beginning to form at the
edges of traditional business information services. If these
services are able to live up to their claims the meat and
potatoes of business information services are going to be
challenged as never before.
Call it Business Information 3.0 for lack of a better term -
a maturing set of content extraction and analysis capabilities
that can catapult upstarts with technical savvy into the
business information limelight far faster than ever before.
Where early online business information plays were more about
being step-ups to "Googling" business information this new
generation of services is aiming squarely at the enterprise
clientele who have been loyal to long-established services for
their content quality and sophisticated tools. There are
a few key factors that Business Information 3.0 is highlighting
that should be of particular concern to traditional business
information providers:
- Quality is as quality does. For a generation of
business information developers the mantra of database
quality has driven their operations. In a sense, though,
these long-established methods for generating quality content
are beginning to become liabilities as much as assets in
light of BI 3.0 offerings. With the ability to gather,
organize and analyze a myriad of sources on the fly BI 3.0
technologies are beginning to create a higher level of
quality for more targeted business information purposes -
albeit with a narrower set of companies for starters, but at
the end of the day services that are looking more at business
results than operational procedures to measure quality.
- Web analytics are more than about taming the "wild"
web. With products such as
Factiva's Insight offering enabling enterprises to keep
abreast of chatter on weblogs and other social media outlets
there's plenty of interest in Web content and technologies at
business information companies. But for the most part these
technologies have been focused on providing add-ons to core
services - not on reinventing their cores. Even as business
information companies focus more on client requirements they
need to be careful as to what they're bringing these
requirements back to in terms of content and enabling
technologies. It's hard to walk away from years of investment
in infrastructure but new players funded by superheated
content investment markets are going to push business
information providers to accelerate the evolution of their
content services.
- Better business plans make for tougher competitors.
The technologies that are the core of BI 3.0 offerings are
certainly a key part of their ability to create appealing
products but just as important are the maturing business
plans of these companies. Generate is targeting specific
opportunities in financial services, insurance, legal,
professional services, executive searches as well as with
online media partners. Zoominfo's new product profile is
looking a lot more like offerings from established business
information providers targeting key functional verticals such
as sales and marketing. Established business information
providers crow a lot about listening carefully to their
clients but they're not the only ones with ears.
Business Information 3.0 is in its early days and is as
fragile a trend as many others relying on investments in new
content technologies: a hiccup in the business cycle could send
many new players to the bit bucket or to a bargain-basement
acquisition mode. But the smart money says that the
presumptions that have underwritten decades of steady growth
for business information services may be equally fragile as
these new capabilities gather steam and exposure to enterprise
audiences. People tend to stick with what works - until the
next thing that works comes along. Be it by acquisition
or by development, BI 3.0 needs to be front and center on
business information providers' radar screens. Today.
-
John Blossom
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