AlacraBlog

The New Alacra Issuer Search

Data Downlink (now Alacra) was founded in 1996 with the idea that we would aggregate and deliver quantitative business information over the web in Excel spreadsheets. Alacra still does this but the value proposition has changed markedly over the years. Our value proposition can now best be described as providing a “single point of access” to disparate business information databases. A recent addition to our disparate set of sources is credit research from Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch. Many of our customers need research from two or all three of these services, and up until now have had to search for research documents serially. The NEW Alacra Issuer Search allows our customers to do a single search on an issuer and get co-mingled results from all three credit rating agencies as well as other relevant information – news, equity research, SEC filings and more. Credit research can be purchased on a transaction basis and for some customers in some situations we can honor existing subscription arrangements.

Alacra in Nashville

SLA is in two weeks. We’ll be there with our team showing off a handful of new databases but more importantly three new applications – Alacra Corporate Connections, Alacra Book for Word and our new Issuer Search, which aggregates credit research from the three credit rating agencies.

We’ve had two sets of inquiries from customers regarding “people” data. First, many customers are trying to solve the “six degrees of separation” problem for sales and marketing efforts. “Who do I know who knows someone at company XYZ?” The other hot topic is conflict checks for professional services firms (law firms primarily) where vetting relationships amongst board members, corporate executives and other clients is critical. Alacra has developed a solution for this - Alacra Corporate Connections - that we’ll be demonstrating at SLA. I’ll cover Alacra Book for Word and our Issuer Search in another post soon.

2004 SIIA Content Forum

Just back from the Content Forum, where all the sessions were good despite the fact that there were no customers in attendance. This is no small feat. While I understand this is an industry gathering, the discussions were taking place in customer-less vacuum.

The final session on Tuesday afternoon was called “Where Is The Industry Headed?” This was well moderated by Ed Keating but the discussion was about as forward-thinking as a fashion magazine – what’s going to be important next season. Although the dynamics of most industries change slowly, the information industry is changing quickly and there were only a small handful of opinions offered about the changes that are upon us.

Twilight of the Information Middlemen

At home yesterday morning, my wife looked over my shoulder as I was reading James Fallows’ Sunday NY Times article The Twilight of the Information Middlemen. “That doesn’t sound good,” she said. But headlines can be deceiving and even The New York Times publishes idiotic articles, even by well-known writers. (This seems to be increasingly the case.) Fallows argues that a) the rise of blogs, and b) the web-availability of publicly-financed information (weather, scientific journals, etc.) are daggers in the heart of various information intermediaries. He’s dead wrong.

Now, the most interesting things about blogs are business models and ways to aggregates them – and filtering out the stuff that Fallows claims “inspires despair”. The need for Kinja, Newsgator and the like rises dramatically as the number of blogs increase. So, there will be a battle of the middlemen in the blog space just as there is in the SEC filing space where GSI, Edgar-Online, 10K Wizard and Disclosure survive aggregating and acting as middlemen for free, publicly-available information. Only business reasons prevent Elsevier from surviving as a middleman for scientific journals – poor pricing and limited value-add.

Ten years ago I gave a presentation to Knight–Ridder executives that focused on the potential disintermediation of Dialog as the web became more prevalent. But Dialog didn’t languish for a decade because it was the twilight of the middlemen, it just couldn’t figure out how to be a competitive intermediary and better meet it’s customer’s needs. Rather than the twilight, we’re in the early morning hours in the life of middlemen.

Bloomberg Marches On

I know one of the salesmen over at Bloomberg. In early February he told me that Bloomberg had sold 1200 net new terminals in January, which I thought was an astonishing number. Reports now say that they averaged 1200 net new terminals a month through the first quarter and I’ve heard that April was pretty good too. The most recent Inside Market Data Reference numbers indicate that Bloomberg has surpassed Reuters in market data revenue. It’s an amazing franchise. The Inside Market Data press release is here.

“It’s official: M&A recovery over”

As I’m usually a contrarian, I love headlines like that. The lead article in London’s Financial News last week highlighted the slowdown in European M&A. After a huge January (in terms of deal value) there has been a bit of a lull. But although Alacra doesn’t break out European vs. North America M&A activity, our usage data indicates there’s still a tremendous amount of investment banking activity. It’s not over yet.