Concluding the Company Information Collection
Jinfo Blog

By Chris Porter

Abstract

Over recent months, FreePint has been taking a fresh look at providers of company information, delving deeply into long-established and newer services to look at issues such as breadth and depth of company profile coverage and integration of profiles with company-related news. Chris Porter picks out some notable highlights.

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In June of last year, FreePint was delighted to take an in-depth look at Avention, a new company, executive and industry information product from the provider formerly known as OneSource.

That review concluded that the vendor had built on its previous strengths as a provider of deep and well-structured data and had moved quickly to launch an improved user interface and innovative workflow capabilities. It also provides very useful integrated access to company reports and filings.

The review of Avention then sparked a wider scrutiny of company information providers.

In the months since then, FreePint has caught up with a variety of vendors in this field, looking at them all through a similar lens to see how they measure up against criteria such as breadth and depth of coverage for quoted and privately held companies; integration of company-related news; or the ability to get quickly up to speed with key company developments in recent months and years. 

The Subscription Article "Vendor Market Overview - Company Information" provides a useful comparative grid which highlights information such as special features and key use-cases.

In a series of reviews and vendor interviews, we were struck by:

• For the LexisNexis Dossier Suite, a considerable breadth - though not always depth - of company-related coverage, as well as integrated access to the vendor's extensive collection of legal and intellectual property data

• For the Companies and Executives component within Dow Jones Factiva, strong integration of global, multilingual company news and very respectable coverage of both quoted and privately held company financials

• For D&B Hoover's - as for LexisNexis - a striking breadth, though less depth, in company coverage; strong support for data integration into wider systems; and some very interesting functionality for those in sales operations, marketing or strategic planning roles who want to uncover areas of potential business opportunity

• For Mergent Online, very highly structured coverage of quoted company financials, including for companies which are no longer active; added-value access to annual report archives;  and a host of "extras" such as proprietary industry and country reports, economic time-series data and neat, visually attractive executive compensation benchmarking analysis

• For BvD Orbis, as ever, an ever-expanding range of highly structured and tightly managed content, as well as many functionality improvements

• For new-generation crowdsourced service Owler, an intriguingly different approach to the sourcing of company-related data.

As the latest FreePint annual Survey on News Needs and Preferences has yet again showed, company-related information is always very near the top of the enterprise information-buyer's wish list - so watch out for further coverage!

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