AlacraBlog

M&A in Information Services

Two deals in the information services space were announced in the past couple of weeks.  Marketresearch.com bought Mindbranch in a consolidating move in market research aggregation. There wasn't a need for two players here and Marketresearch.com was the more successful business and had the more recognized brand.  Although in other segments with only a few distributors, consumers might be concerned about price increases, Thomson Research and Profound (also owned by Thomson) are alternative sources and the competition is largely among the publishers, not the distributors.  So there shouldn't be any impact on prices.   Congratulations to Rob Granader at Marketresearch.com.

The other deal was Thomson West buying Global Securities Inc., the leading value-added provider of SEC filing information.  GSI generates most of their revenue from the law firm market, hence the great fit with West.  It's great to see another successful business built (and sold) adding value to information and integrating this information into user's workflow.  Congratulations to Phil Brown at GSI and Ken Marlin at Marlin & Associates who advised on the deal.

Marketresearch.com, parts of Thomson and GSI are Alacra content partners.

The 200 Club - Offshoring/Outsourcing

I attended my first 200 Club meeting on Wednesday night.  The discussion topic was Offshoring/Outsourcing and the guest speakers were Alison Harmon and Stephen Phillips.  Although the event was slated as a debate between "for" Offshoring/Outsourcing (Stephen) and "against" (Alison) there was general agreement that  properly managed, Offshored and Outsourced resources could be used to provide cost-effective information services for a financial institutions and other professional service firms.  Properly managed and with the appropriate expectations are critical.  Cost savings don't happen immediately; there are a lot of start-up costs that push cost savings out until beyond year one,as well as the incredibly high turnover of employees.   Also pointed out was that all arbitrage is fleeting - wages eventually catch up with productivity.  There were several comments to the effect that as wages in India move up, outsourced resources would quickly move east. Overall all the topic was very well presented, without PowerPoint... Next 200 Club meeting is Wednesday September 7 - the topic is Change Management.

Blogging From London

The City seems to have bounced back quickly from Thursday’s bombings.  I passed the Aldgate tube station in a taxi this morning; the site was blocked off with canvas covered fencing.  There were, of course, plenty of emergency vehicles and policemen, but once we got passed the fencing everything was normal.  I’ve been on a number of crowded tubes and buses. 

I’m over here for meetings with content providers and customers.  The timing worked out so I can also attend tonight’s SLA Europe Summer Soiree which we are sponsoring and tomorrow night’s regular meeting of the 200 Club. The 200 Club is a London-based networking group of senior decision makers in the knowledge and information arena.  Tomorrow night’s meeting topic is Offshoring/Outsourcing and the speakers are Alison Harman of UBS and Stephen Phillips of Morgan Stanley.

Happy Birthday Alacra!

I once overheard our CEO Steve Goldstein tell a journalist that "our only policy is to hire smart people we think would be best for the job and who we've determined during the interview process would work well with our staff already here."  He went on saying, "our view [he and President Mike Angle's view] is that the excellent work environment we have here at Alacra is due to the direct contributions made by each person here."

On Thursday, Alacra celebrated it's 9th birthday with our annual International Wine and Food Fest. As always it was great fun.  We had a chance to congratulate the Alacra staff who celebrated five years here with us, to welcome some new folks and to stuff our faces.  There were homemade Spanish tortilla's, Indian meat pastries, a secret chicken recipe, chocolate Alacra birthday cake, and lots of odiferous cheeses.  And, wine of course, lots of it...from all over the world. I even had my first PIMS which, according to CFO Mike Millar, is the ideal English summer party drink.

As we get bigger and busier, it seems there's less and less time for us to spend together socially, getting to know each other as individuals and friends, not just colleagues and enjoying each other's company.  Naturally, we look forward to these in-house shindigs to make up for some of that and luckily, we all play pretty nice together.

Cosmetics scion Mary Kay once said "A company is only as good as the people it keeps," a fact Steve and Mike clearly know well.

Carol Ann Thomas, Alacra Marketing Manager

Alacra Q2 Review

Every quarter we send customers an email that describes the new content we've added as well as enhancements we've made to our services.  Our second quarter review can be seen here.

RSS Is New Media for Business

In the past ten years, the established consumer delivery channels for news, information and entertainment have been attacked by new technologies.  Newspapers are dying due to online delivery of news and, more importantly, online classified ads.  Broadcast TV viewers have moved to cable networks, pay-per-view movies and digital video recorders.  Consumers increasingly want to see movies at home instead of in theaters.  Recorded music and movies remain vulnerable to file sharing, even with the Grokster verdict.  Radio is under attack from satellite, iPod usage and now podcasting. 

Little of this has had much affect on the business information marketplace.  Although broadband access at the desktop is ubiquitous, the main benefits have been to lower information delivery costs for publishers and aggregators and bring consumer-level information to the workplace.

Outside of the training area though, audio and video content are rarely used in the business information arena.  There’s no file sharing.  It’s tough to time shift business information; now or faster are often the only options. 

But the innovation that is likely to have a significant impact for business information consumers is RSS.  There is significant demand for well-filtered, current awareness information but prior to the widespread acceptance of RSS, standards did not exist for the consistent delivery of disparate types of business information.  Alerts have been typically sent by publishers to email boxes where they lost impact.

I don’t know if the opportunities in RSS warrant an RSS-focused venture capital fund, but given its widespread appeal and applications, both for consumers and for businesses, RSS is in the early stages of an extremely large adoption curve.  RSS might be trapped in geekland now, but not for long.