Lots of positioning at D&B
Jinfo Blog

19th November 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Business information provider Hoover’s has announced that it has integrated personal contact information from Jigsaw into its ConnectMail service. The new subscription add-on gives customers of Hoover’s access to a community of 7.5 million contacts which is claimed to be growing by 25,000 per day (http://digbig.com/5baqqa). Compiled through the collaboration of its individual members, Jigsaw grows partly by incentivising their participation; as an alternative to paying for data, members can earn tradable points when they contribute or update contacts. It’s been in partnership with Hoover’s parent Dun & Bradstreet for several months already, and says that its wiki model renders its information rapidly self-correcting, compared with a claimed 80% inaccuracy rate in most customer relationship management systems (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e19510). Also on the contact management front, last October Hoover’s announced that it was integrating its information with Oracle CRM On Demand. This will allow users to import prospect lists into the Oracle service with potential duplicates identified, use additionally located contacts to cross-sell into existing accounts, better prepare for sales calls – and reduce their preparation and research time as a result (http://digbig.com/5baqqb). Now there are reports that D&B is in the running for a bid for infoGroup, including the veteran data integrator OneSource. A successful acquisition, says one expert commentator, would give D&B further options for leveraging its information for greater profits (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e26924). ‘The days of the multi-billion dollar data industry being under the rule of the few, and accessible only by the few with deep pockets, are over,’ Jigsaw’s co-founder Jim Fowler claimed earlier this year (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e6792). That may still be true if you’re happy to assemble the business data you need for yourself – but if you want the complete package there’s a possibility that you may have even fewer and bigger suppliers to go to in the future.

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