NEWS ANALYSIS: ITEM

			Business Valentine: LexisNexis and Factiva Up the Romance for Business Content Users
			John Blossom
			14 February 2005
SUMMARY:			Hearts and flowers get delivered less often these days to high-quality business database deliverers compared to those who are getting the right content to the right people at the right time, regardless of its source. Recent moves by Factiva and LexisNexis to up their content quotients for targeted audiences underscore the importance of developing quality via solutions and unique on-the-fly sources for audiences that aggregators can "own".  Business content aggregators are evolving into a new kind of content supplier that can position itself effectively alongside traditional publishers and surging institutional and Web-based content collection capabilities.  It takes a lot of romancing to win an audience, but these major aggregators are investing heavily to establish and maintain long-term fidelity.

We may be hard on major aggregators at times in our analysis of content markets, but there's no doubting that the bigs of business content continue to express their affections for their clients in new and productive ways. The last couple of weeks have seen a spate of announcements from Factiva and LexisNexis providing new sources, functionality and market targeting that up their profiles with core business markets requiring business intelligence. For Factiva this has included an announcement of its acquisition of the 2B Group, a U.K.-based reputation management software firm with which Factiva hopes to build on its earlier efforts with IBM's Web Fountain. Factiva is also expanding is relationship with FAST Search and Transfer to facilitate its text mining operations for capturing new forms of content and has announced two major new interfaces for business users. Its new SalesWorks package provides functionality aimed at the sales execs prospecting for clients and a Companies and Executives interface tuned to more complex analysis of potential competitors and partners.  In the meantime LexisNexis has been beefing up its business content for legal clients courtesy of Factiva  with  additional news sources and an announced addition of enhanced credit and business reports from Dun & Bradstreet.

In all of these moves the emphasis is on providing more content value to specific audiences for business content. From a Factiva perspective this has meant enhancing its focus on business processes enhanced by workflow-oriented tools and content analysis capabilities. While business content veteran OneSource has more established integration capabilities for supporting sales force automation, the suite that Factiva has assembled through its SalesWorks and Companies and Executives packages is aimed to parallel OneSource's product line in breadth and focus and offers reputation management and content analysis capabilities not available in OneSource's suite. OneSource also does not benefit from LexisNexis' expanded product line from D&B to support its own focused business content functions. It's unclear how much of this increased use of D&B content  is related to last year's acquisition of OneSource by InfoUSA, which appears to be moving OneSource to pare down its cost structure to fit into InfoUSA's lean-and-mean operations. But clearly it's been easier for competitors of OneSource to pick up additional D&B content and to focus development dollars on OneSource's core markets than it's been for InfoUSA to beef up internal sources of content and functionality via OneSource to compete in high-flying corporate circles.

The market will be the ultimate judge the quality of these additions to business content delivery, but there are some clear signals coming through these moves to bear in mind already. A few items to consider:

• The quality is in the solution. There's no getting around needing high standards for data quality in a premium business content solution, but there's also not much to be gained if that quality is not easily accessible to the right audiences. If a company can produce better content quality for less money by bringing content production in-house or offshore, then more power to them. But a constantly refined solution that responds rapidly to shifting and highly contextual content needs oftentimes carries the day. In a global content marketplace it's increasingly easy to create high-quality databases anywhere in the world, while understanding business processes and how content is valued in them is a capability not easily outsourced. The solution may be more than presenting just another Web interface, though, a factor that aggregators are just beginning to grasp as content packaging and delivery develops a more sophisticated range of digital services.
• The quality is in the uniqueness.  It's notable that Factiva is focusing to create unique value in a combination of contextualized  industry-standard resources in parallel with developing its own unique sources of content derived from content analysis and extraction. While there's always mileage to be had in aggregating other premium sources the "special sauce" of unique and tailored content sources is just as important as solutions software in driving product value. For database-driven aggregators used to traditional levels of content quality control designed for years of production efficiency harnessing this uniqueness may seem to be counterintuitive at times. But in an era when harnessing business opportunities means harvesting increasingly transitory insights delivering business content that's truly unique in the moment for a very small audience is just as important as delivering content that is available to a mass audience via an aggregator.
• The quality is in the audience. Dun & Bradstreet continues to rely on aggregator such as LexisNexis and Factiva to distribute content from both its main D&B products and content from its Hoover's online business portal. Hoover's is very successful in and of its own right with its online audience for business content but does not own the same desktop "turf" in major institutions as LexisNexis and Factiva with key audiences. Similarly, Factiva benefits from its LexisNexis distribution arrangement to legal audiences that it does not "own" as LexisNexis does. By focusing less on expanding their own content collections with non-unique content and more on the unique content needs of specific audiences, major aggregators can leverage the New Aggregation model to learn how to "own" audiences at the true point of content aggregation - their users' servers and personal devices. Successful business content aggregation is less about assembling a database of licensed content and more about owning the needs of discrete audiences and delivering content to them from wherever it lives in whatever way the audience values it most.

These steps by LexisNexis and Factiva are incremental changes, but coming quickly enough that the direction of change becomes more apparent day by day. As control of licensable content becomes less important than delivering content of all kinds to the right audiences in the right contexts the pace of change is also increasingly rapid. With software companies, integrators and services on the open Web in fast pursuit of their audiences, major business aggregators have no choice but to pucker up and love their audiences as fast as they can. That makes it a very happy Valentine's Day for business audiences everywhere.

- John Blossom

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