United Business Media/CMP Use Acquisition to Further Bolster Electronics Group

United Business Media plc this month announced its acquisition of Portelligent Inc. on behalf of CMP Technology. CMP is United Business Media's U.S.-based marketing solutions business that serves the information technology industries.

Portelligent is a provider of teardown data and analyses of high volume portable consumer electronics products--from cellular phones to digital cameras. The company's teardown reports feature a structured overview of system features, a complete bill of materials, system architecture analyses and performance metric assessments. Portelligent has a database of more than 500 reports and adds more than 100 reports each year.

Customers license online access to these teardown analyses and also use related services, such as Key Metrics Reports, database access tool and extracts from the Portelligent Product Profile Database. These products help customers with their decision-making processes in a variety of business areas, including product development, technical marketing and competitive benchmarking. Portelligent boasts an equally diverse customer base that is comprised of semiconductor and electronic component manufacturers, fabless integrated circuit design houses, cellular handset makers, consumer electronics manufacturers, wireless carriers, financial analysts and intellectual property licensing firms.

This acquisition is certainly a boost to CMP's Electronics Group. In a press release announcing the deal, Paul Miller, president of the Electronic Group, noted how Portelligent would meld with Semiconductor Insights (which was acquired by CMP in July) and a recently-announced Intellectual Property Symposium. He also noted how the group has invested about $40 million in the group over the last two years to further develop this part of the business. This includes the acquisitions of TechOnLine and Ho Machines Work.

All of these deals are positioned to help CMP provide the broadest array of offerings for its customers. In the process, the company has effectively made the transition from print to alternative offerings as well. Miller notes that print products will generate only 20 percent of the group's revenues in 2008. The rest will be generated by data-based products, including those produced by Portelligent, and online and event products. CMP has really made a strong commitment to move beyond print, and this acquisition just helps illustrate that dedication to providing customers with the content and delivery methods they demand these days.

Two Recent Moves Position D&B For Long-Term Growth

D&B recently announced two separate initiatives designed to position the company for long-term growth. The first is a joint venture with Japan's Tokyo Shoko Research (TSR) of which D&B will become the majority shareholder and trade under the name Dun & Bradstreet TSR Ltd. This venture will enable D&B to simultaneously bolster its presence in Japan and in its risk management sector that targets large business customers and global multinational firms. Operations related to the venture are expected to kick off in fiscal 2008.

D&B also announced its acquisition of Purisma Inc., a commercial data integration (CDI) software solutions provider, for $48 million. The deal is designed to help D&B bolster its presence in the CDI market. According to a press release announcing the acquisition, Purisma's data hub and CDI software appliance are built to leverage the D&B database, which will simplify the integration of D&B data with customers' internal systems and further embed D&B offerings behind the customer firewall.

Both deals seem like smart moves by D&B for different reasons. It's so important these days to have the most comprehensive products and services available. And Purisma will help D&B do just that by raising its profile in the marketplace. But that's certainly not the end of the story. It's also vital that customers, wherever they are located, can have access to your company's solutions. In today's global marketplace, that means being aggressive in markets beyond your home country's borders. Doing so may seem like an intimidating proposition, if you go it alone. That's another reason why D&B's joint venture with TSR makes sense. This established player undoubtedly understands the nuances of its customer base and will help position D&B for success.

Case Settles with Nothing Settled

ECRI, a not-for-profit information provider serving the healthcare industry, is often referred to as "the Consumer Reports of medical products." ECRI obtains and tests a broad range of medical products for quality, safety and efficacy and relays its results back to buyers of these products via written reports. Its influence in the industry is enormous.

As an offshoot of this core business activity, ECRI also publishes something called PriceGuide, an online service that shows actual prices paid for disposable and consumable medical products. ECRI gathers this information from hospitals, aggregates and standardizes the information, then sells it back to hospitals and other interested parties. It's a classic data publishing model.

PriceGuide was a good -- and quiet -- business for ECRI for more than ten years. Then, in 2006, it received a complaint from medical device manufacturer Boston Scientific, which claimed that all its hospital customers had signed confidentiality agreements that prohibited them from distributing this information to third-parties. ECRI took the stance that the information was accurate and voluntarily provided to it by these hospitals.

There are two important issues at play here: a) can companies keep their negotiated prices secret, and b) can a publisher be liable for violating a confidentiality agreement it never signed? Indeed, it's reasonable to ask why Boston Scientific didn't sue the hospitals that had disclosed this allegedly confidential data. According to some industry pundits, Boston Scientific wanted its pricing kept confidential but didn't want to offend its hospital customers, so it instead went after the publisher.

The stakes in this case were high. With product price data being viewed as "the final frontier" by many data publishers, any right of manufacturers to hold their pricing confidential would severely limit this area of opportunity. Further, can a data publisher be held liable for information it publishes that it received voluntarily and in good faith from an often large number of individual companies? A court ruling in the wrong direction could rattle the foundations of the data publishing industry.

But someone has blinked. With the December 3 trial date fast approaching, the New York Times reports that the two parties have settled, with no terms disclosed, and neither party is commenting. So now there will be far more eyes than usual scanning to see if Boston Scientific pricing appears in the next update to PriceGuide. And we should expect to see more cases like this in the future, as manufacturers become increasingly worried that the transparency of the web coupled with sophisticated data products give them less room to wheel and deal. While this case may be closed, the threat is still one our industry needs to keep an eye on because the underlying issues still remain.

Labels: Boston Scientific, ECRI, PriceGuide

ZoomInfo Introduces Bizographics

Business information search engine ZoomInfo last week announced its plan to launch a bizographic platform. It is a website traffic analysis and advertising targeting platform based on individuals' "business demographics." The company plans to start small, making the bizographic targeting available to advertisers on the ZoomInfo web site. ZoomInfo expects to launch a full suite of related products next year.

ZoomInfo, which is known for its deep business content (profiles of 3.5 million companies and nearly 40 million professionals), has developed a proprietary mechanism for tracking and associating bizographic information (from industry to functional area to education) on business people in a non-personally identifiable way.

ZoomInfo expects this offering with help marketers target their online advertising based on the audience of a site instead of the content.

It's an interesting and timely offering, considering an ever increasing interest from advertisers to make the online channel an effective and profitable one. Still, regardless of the channel, advertisers and marketers are always looking for ways in which to reach their desired audience with the most relevant offers possible. This seems like a promising solution to many of the issues facing advertisers and marketers today. ZoomInfo is promising quick ROI for participating clients. They'll have a winner if they can deliver.

Zillow, Newspapers Form Extensive Partnership

Real estate website Zillow.com has formed a partnership with 11 newspaper publishing companies representing 282 newspapers across the U.S. that calls for the newspapers to feature their local classified advertising (for-sale listings and open house information) on the Zillow platform.

Local advertisers who place print and online listings with these newspapers will have the option to include those listings and open house ads on Zillow as well. It will certainly help them increase their reach, as Zillow boasts 4 million site visitors a month. According to Zillow, 70 percent of those individuals are in the process of buying or selling a home or plan to do so within the next year or two. While Zillow users will now have access to a much broader collection of listings as a result of this partnership, advertisers will also now be able to further enhance their online presence through real estate content and information on homes, neighborhoods and value trends courtesy of Zillow's technology.

The newspaper companies included in this partnership include Hearst Newspapers, Journal Register Company, The E.W. Scripps Company and The Day Publishing Company. Individual newspapers the companies publish include The San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, The Tampa Tribune and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Zillow and the newspapers expect to launch their collaboration during the first half of 2008. Additional companies are also expected to sign on before the official launch date.

Zillow has certainly made a lot of news lately and the announcement of this rather aggressive move is no exception. It continues to launch new products and services to attract a very active user base and this expansive partnership should only help draw even more users to the site. In such a short time--the site only launched in early 2006--Zillow has really gained a lot of credibility in the real estate marketplace as a reliable information source. Having the support of these major newspaper companies will further extend that credibility.

And, instead of competing against the newspapers for visitors' eyes, Zillow is creating a solid, unified source of real estate data for visitors across the country. The partnership will also help the newspapers in their efforts to remain on the cutting edge of technology. By relying more heavily on the Zillow platform, they will be assured that their real estate content and services will be as easy to access and use as possible, which should translate into an increase in web traffic and improved advertising sales results for all involved.