Comtex Tightens Relationship at Wholesale Level with Integrator Pinnacor
Comtex News Network has announced that they are expanding their relationship with content integrator Pinnacor to further its wholesale business of providing streaming news feeds to institutions in finance and other sectors. The news feed aggregator business has fallen on hard times in many ways, along with other content aggregators that do not offer significant integration capabilities. While it's too early to make the call for a buyout of Comtex by Pinnacor, they are caught between the pressures of news search engines on the open Web and the need to rely on B2B integrators to position its content in institutional portals that no longer try to emulate the "dot com" look and instead focus on business process integration. Wholesaling content will have its place, but without a strategy to provide a wider range of value-add services and its sources becoming ever more adept at XML-based normalization of their services, Comtex, like many aggregators, faces the uncomfortable prospect of becoming little more than a subscription agent for a range of content services that's likely to decrease over time. Unless Comtex and similar companies can provide more value-add services to their content suppliers, they will probably be better off merging with those that can provide better services to their content consumers.