While business information remains a robust market segment in the content industry, it has not been without its challenges in recent years. Increasingly rapid changes in organizations and careers trigger demand for ever-fresher information on companies, people and products, making services that can help it to be found and used effectively critical to most business operations. What was once an industry of bulk data, mailing lists and a few integrated company reports is now a market that demands integration of business information into sales and marketing platforms, strategic dashboards and all-in-one online services.
It's no surprise, then, that Dun & Bradstreet is among the companies mentioned by Reuters putting in a bid for infoGroup, the Omaha, Nebraska-based business information service that produces mailing list services and OneSource, an integrated database of global business information sources targeted at major corporations. D&B finds itself in the awkward situation of having a "gold standard" reputation for its core company information listings but relatively few options for it to leverage that information for greater profits in its own operations. D&B's Hoovers online business information service is doing well in capturing users in small and medium organizations with a mixture of subscription and ad-supported services, but that leaves larger organizations and bulk data services to others - including its parent D&B.
While the infoGroup bidding process could go any number of ways, including a "no-sale" decision, my guess is that we're very likely to see D&B come out on the top of this process. D&B and infoGroup have much to offer one another, in terms of both operations abilities and markets. For infoGroup the pluses it brings include a huge wealth of business and consumer contact data, its ruthless efficiencies in driving out costs from data acquisition and maintenance and a OneSource platform that brings together a very broad array of high-quality business information sources in both its own online services and in enterprise platforms such as CRM and business intelligence portals. For D&B, its company ratings, profiles, Hoover's online savvy and its highly respected brand and enterprise sales and support organization would combine to provide a parent that could build a far more complete portfolio of business information services. No merger is perfect or without pain, but this looks like one that will create some pretty strong market mojo.
And it will take some mojo to keep up with the changes in the business information market over the next few years. The emphasis on business information services is on integration, real-time freshness and usefulness and having all of the sources at your fingertips needed to make decisions about corporate strategy, sales and marketing. Companies like Axciom and Experian are expanding their footprints in business information services rapidly, making an expansion of D&B's overall profile in business information services a priority if they are to leverage their brand effectively. And in the wings are expanding business information services from Dow Jones, and probable expansions by Thomson Reuters as well - with perhaps even an acquisition of LexisNexis assets from Reed Elsevier in play. Throw in younger business information brands such as Jigsaw, InsideView and Zoominfo beginning to cater to not only online-aware companies but core corporate markets as well, and you can see that business information is not a sleepy content market sector by any stretch of the imagination.
This appears to be one of those situations where two companies with both the right needs and the right level of maturities in their operations and management come along at the right time. It took a few years for infoGroup to whip its properties into better shape, and it's taken a few years for D&B to integrate Hoover's operations effectively and to identify the greater opportunities for their products and services. Here's hoping that these two companies find that their fits are as complementary as they appear to be.
Building on Wednesday's launch of free individual and bulk company data from Jigsaw there's an announcement from business information provider Hoover's on its addition of more than a million new contacts for mid-level executives in major companies from an unnamed third party source (but given which service is focused on harvesting mid-level contacts from sales professionals it's not too hard to figure out). Pull up the record for GE, for example, and Hoover's provides access to more than 4,500 employees, now including employees from subsidiaries as well. That helps to cut down on the "which of those doggone divisions is he/she in?" conundrum that can slow down the search for appropriate contacts. With company records becoming increasingly commoditized this emphasis on contacts data integrated in with its Hoover's Connect social media feature is a key component of Hoover's future.
The other neat function is the ability to add one's own profile into the Hoover's business information database, somewhat along the lines of what ECNext is doing with company information on their Manta platform targeted at small to medium sized enterprises. Add in your bio, education, memberships in associations, add an option to receive contact via the Hoover's platform and it's off to their editors for final review and posting. You have to go looking for the feature way down on a company page, but it's there and is a start towards enabling the gathering of the kinds of valuable information that LinkedIn and other business-oriented social media services are enabling.
Overall Hoover's continues its efforts on reviving the once-flagging brand that had been turned into a cash cow by D&B just about the time that it needed serious new investment. The need to turn the cow into a star again is now clear at D&B and many of the efforts are starting to pay off. Long a leader in pressing the envelope for online workflow design, The Hoover's interface manages to present a ton of information and a wealth of features in a highly usable form. The real question seems to be, though, when and how often people will visit the Hoover's portal - or any heavy-duty business information portal.
Business information tools like Zoominfo beckon with a Google-esque simplicity to its ad-supported design and fairly rich features, if with less in-depth content, from its subscription-level service. The growth of Zoominfo in particular seems to be putting a damper on both established business information services and up-and-comers as it aggregates content harvested from with web with licensed content supplements. Part of Hoover's response to this "stickiness" issue is to highlight their editorial staff via topic-oriented business blogs that are featured prominently on the ad-supported front page and elsewhere within the site. It's an innovative move, but one that seems to be still looking for a big payoff in improved site traffic.
The main problem that Hoover's and other business information services face is that it's hard to keep on heaping on great portal features and expect to get commensurate returns on the investment in those features every single time. With a wide range of contexts in which people want business information on a personal and professional basis the ability to integrate content in contexts far beyond one's portal becomes a key factor for building the brand value of business information. At the same time there are more opportunities to use the value of contexts in a portal such as Hoover's to gain more lucrative positioning of ad-supported content. Instead of having some mass-market ad show up when someone with a known business profile is looking at a company's information, isn't that the perfect opportunity for that company to tout itself or to have related B2B products and services crop up from a ThomasNet network or such? The ad value of business information is still very underappreciated and under-exploited.
So overall the Hoover's portal continues to make healthy strides forward but it must continue to build innovation in a year in which the economy makes "pretty good" free or more targeted substitutes more popular than ever. Both the short-run and long-run track for Hoover's continues to offer challenges that they must battle, but at least their sword is getting sharper in order to take them on.
Hats off to Jim Fowler, who has to be one of the gutsiest startup CEOs out there. Taking on the heart of the business information industry with his Jigsaw collaborative community that collects business contact and company information is one thing: personally announcing the launch of their new Open Data Initiative in a YouTube video shot on some of the more funky streets of San Francisco is quite another. It sets the scene for a very interesting move into promoting the use of Jigsaw as a service that can enable people to get high-quality contact data by giving people free access to company information.
Jigsaw has built up a base of about 450,000 people who give and take business contact information and challenge one another's submissions via the Jigsaw portal. Think of Jigsaw as Wikipedia for business contacts with far better rules and to boot a premium content model. It's a "give-to-get" model that allows people to earn credits towards getting business contact information for free if they provide enough quality information themselves but which will also charge people to see contact information if they have maxed out their quota for free contact views. On the back end of this database Jigsaw has built a tidy little business selling the information collected via their portals to enterprises and other services that need up-to-date contact and company information in their internal databases and sales automation services.
It's a good business, but the hard part has been scaling the online community to the point where Jigsaw becomes a must-visit destination that will enable them to build up information beyond the 2 million businesses and 8 million contacts already tracked in their database. Making the basic company name and address information available for free - it comes along anyway on the business contact information that people input on Jigsaw - creates a powerful endorsement for membership in Jigsaw that's likely to push its positioning as a default destination for inputting business contact information. In doing so Jigsaw may have taken a huge step forward in accelerating the growth of their database, helped along by the many key sales automation platforms that are already positioned to use content from the Open Data Initiative.
Company information is available for free elsewhere online, of course, through services such as Hoover's, ECNext's Manta portal and Zoominfo, so to some degree Jigsaw's Open Data Initiative is playing catch-up with the online positioning of other business information services. However, with the Open Data Initiative Jigsaw is making this information available in bulk form as well. That's a huge step forward in neutralizing some of the power of other services that have been building their bread and butter on filtered company lists -and a strong incentive to make Jigsaw a default plan "B" feed for company information, if not their plan "A". Major business information services, please take note: those low margins on your list services just got a bit of a challenge.
What's most interesting about the Jigsaw Open Data Initiative is its potential to increase the likelihood that Jigsaw can become a more timely source of updates for accurate business contact information both from online sources and from the many enterprise services through which Jigsaw information can be consumed, and, in theory, updated. The opportunity to make desktop and mobile sales automation and email services input points for real-time business contact updates works already in a limited fashion for services like Plaxo, but with a more serious footprint in the love-to-update-those-contacts culture of today's mobile sales forces Jigsaw may have found the accelerator that they've been looking for as they've continued to refine their offerings.
In the meantime traditional business information providers continue to be challenged on all sides by nimble competitors such as Jigsaw who are willing to view their audience as knowledgeable participants in the gathering of business information. Enterprises still move cautiously towards these new services, but as they discover that interactivity with users enables them to get more accurate content more quickly there is a tipping point approaching rapidly beyond which the Dun & Bradstreets of the world must worry mightily about the ability of their organizations and their business models to survive. There is still a powerful marketplace for quality business information, but Jigsaw challenges traditional suppliers to consider how the real-time collection capabilities of today's publishing-enabled audiences can accelerate the value of those services rapidly.
