AlacraBlog

Alacra's 10th Anniversary Party in London

It's been 10 years since we opened the doors in London to sell our first product, .xls.   We decided right from the start that the company required a presence in both London and NY to serve our customers.  When Don Roll, one of our early "friends and family" investors, became available after the Bridge merger with Knight-Ridder Financial, we decided to take the plunge. Our first London hire  in February 1998 was Gail Jewsbury; she was our first sales person. Gail is still with us as our European Sales Director and has seen the countless changes over the years as we have  grown our product line from just selling content on a transaction basis over the internet to a full range of work flow software solutions.  Our London office has grown over the years and now provides sales, support, project management and software development for our customers in Europe and Asia.

On Tuesday night we took over the Northbank Restaurant on the Thames by the Millennium Bridge to celebrate this milestone.  Over 100 attendees spanning our customers, content partners and employees joined us for the evening.  It was a great way to say thanks to everyone for supporting us over the years and making Alacra possible.

We are looking forward to a bigger bash for our 20th Anniversary in 2018.

 

In the photos:
Sarah Parker (E&Y), Julia Duggan (E&Y), Rob Barrons (Alacra), Alecia Cummins (E&Y)
James McLaughlin (Citi), Andy Hughes (Citi), Gail Jewsbury (Alacra) ,Martin Ainsworth (Citi)
Donald Roll (Alacra), Jonathan Alexander (Merrill Lynch), Catherine Grist (Alacra) and Jeremy Bentley (Smartlogic)
Cathy McEwing (Alacra), Martin Yau (Dresdner), Mohammad Hossain (Alacra)

SLA Seattle Recap

Where to start?  This was Alacra's 11th SLA Conference so now we've done the cycle - the venue was Seattle in 1997 as well.  In 1997 it was tough to get a decent internet connection in the exhibit hall and Starbucks had not yet completely taken over coffee retailing.  This year's conference was reasonably well-attended; I noticed fewer visitors than previous years and there were definitely fewer academic and public librarians walking up to our stand.  The exhibition space was actually broken in half; we were fortunate to be in the same hall with the industry giants - Dow Jones, LexisNexis, ThomsonReuters, Elsevier, etc.  The other part of the exhibit hall had a large number of smaller exhibitors (BvD being one of the exceptions) and they must have felt as if they were in Siberia. The major buzz of the conference was the recent announcement that ProQuest was rescuing Dialog by buying it from Thomson.  My former Knight-Ridder colleague Libby Trudell was thrilled.  I also heard a lot of positive comments about Leadership Directories' Leadership Networks product.  One surprise was the enormous Bloomberg stand in the middle of the main exhibit hall floor which had the tagline "Bloomberg. For Lawyers." plastered on it.
This year's client dinner was held at a fabulous restaurant - Cafe Juanita - in Kirkland.  It was a bit far from the convention center but the food was absolutely fantastic.  Fran and Carol Ann did a terrific job scoping out the ideal venue for what is always a great evening during SLA.  We'll post some pictures soon

Packing Up For SLA in Seattle

The only time I have ever been to Seattle was for the Special Libraries Annual Conference many (10?) years ago.  Despite the long flight I'm looking forward to going back for this year's edition.  The SLA has lined up two excellent keynote speakers: Vint Cerf of Google and super-blogger and marketer extraordinaire Seth Godin.  Alacra VP of Sales Fran Falchook is speaking on a couple of panels and I will be presenting at the Vendor Speed Dating session on Tuesday afternoon.  If your coming out to the conference, please stop by our booth - we're #123.

In Case You Missed It...The M&A Market Is OK

Deal Journal had an excellent post titled M&A Recession? More Like 2006 Redux. What it's saying is that the  M&A market is not so bad.  Clearly not as good as 2007, which was the best year on record, fueled by private equity activity in the first half of the year.  But, "global deal volume this year is up 3% from the same period in 2006. And remember, 2006 was the biggest year in M&A history prior to 2007, with $3.93 trillion in M&A volume, according to Dealogic."

AlacraBlog interviews Jon Brandow from BizMiner

  

BizMiner is a new ACM Contributor to the Alacra Store and Alacra Premium.  Recently, Ron Waksman, Alacra's VP of eCommerce chatted with Jon Brandow of BizMiner about their content.

Tell us about BizMiner.

There are three important things to know about BizMiner. 

First, this is a small company. If you call in with a question about our web site or reports, you're likely to speak with a principal right away. If not, you'll get a return call within a few hours if its a business day and in every case by the next business day.

Second, despite our size, I believe that we offer more granular industry statistics covering more market areas than anyone else in the information business. We don't try to be all things to all people, but what we have chosen to do is unduplicated in the marketplace.

Third, we are always aware that our customers range from sole proprietors and entrepreneurs to Fortune 100 companies. Our products span the needs every audience in that base. I can't tell you the number of times that a multi-billion dollar bank or finance firm has urged a small business client of theirs to use our services -- based on the larger company's own experience.

What are some typical uses for BizMiner content?

Many firms use our content to examine new market opportunities or understand their customers' markets. For example, if you want hard numbers to decide if the pizza shop market is already saturated in Oshkosh, we have an off the shelf report that supplies the data you need. If you need to understand the trends among a couple dozen different computer service or software segments, we have that as well.

An equally large segment of our customers use our reports with their own clients as part of value added services they deliver. Valuation professionals, business and management consultants, accountants, real estate firms, banks and finance companies are all important to our customer base. All of these use a mix of our industry financial and market research reporting, based on their own clients' needs.

Finally, our small business customers are largely principals who come to us directly when they are putting together a business plan, a marketing plan or a loan application. They want hard, specific financial benchmarks and market trend data; Luckily we can offer that both cost-effectively and at an unsurpassed level of granularity.

What makes your content unique?

The combination of detail and integrity. We report on more than 16,000 lines of business, and break our industry trends for them all in more than 300 US markets, breaking out national data, the states and more than 250 metro areas. I don't know of a more granular set of databases for market research trends and industry financial reporting.

Our databases also let us perform what we statistical geeks like to call "longitudinal analysis", that is, experience-rated analysis that tracks the experience of specific sets of firms (or industries or market areas) over time. As a result, we can offer customers information on business failure rates, or tell them what a firm that's been in a specific industry market for three years can expect by way of gross sales or revenue per employee.

The current economic environment can be rough for publishers but also provides opportunities. How is the economy impacting your market today?

The demand for the sort of information we offer is somewhat cushioned from many bumps in the economy. In good times, businesses look to expand and need hard industry numbers to help them decide where to go. In bad times, downsizing forces more people to think seriously about becoming entrepreneurs, and our content helps their investigation.

What might surprise your customers to learn about Company/Database?

Our database was originally developed because I was a planning consultant who grew increasingly frustrated with the quality of industry data that was available for projects I developed with public and private sector clients. When my personal situation dictated less travel, searching for ways to fill the information gap for granular, timely industry statistics seemed like a natural. I hadn't originally planned to be in the information business.

Which leads to a second tidbit about BizMiner. Our team boasts all the right educational credentials, but I also spent nine years working as a shipyard welder, which is a great way to learn how to maintain some perspective on yourself, your work and those around  you -- to know what really tough business conditions are like. Believe me, by contrast, BizMiner is fun --and easy.

BizMiner is delivering their content through the recently launched Alacra Content Marketplace, which makes it easy for content providers to deliver their content through the Alacra platform.

To see recent research from BizMiner, visit the BizMiner Publisher page on AlacraStore.com. 

If you are interested in contributing your content to the Alacra Store(www.alacrastore.com), please contact Ron Waksman at ron[dot]waksman[at]alacra[dot]com.

You Are What You Publish #4

I've posted several times in the past (here, here, here) on the importance of carefully considering what you publish on the web.  I was at a college admissions workshop last weekend that was hosted by the University of Rochester.  One of the speakers explained that at some schools, an admissions officer might look through 7000 applications.  They clearly don't have time to look at the Facebook page of each applicant, but occasionally they will take a peek and what they see there could have an impact on the admission decision.  One other thing - applicants should not have a provocative email address - it's an immediate turn-off for an admissions officer.

My Favorite Time of Year

Yes, summer is around the corner. Kids will be off to camp after finals.  But what's really great is that our summer interns started this week.  Every summer we hire one or more summer interns to work on a project we think they can complete in 8 or 10 weeks.  Past projects include an Alacra.com redesign, the Alacrawiki, and ResearchRecap.com.  This summer we have two interns who are helping us figure out what to do with blog content - how can we provide value without boiling the ocean. Hiren Surti, who is in between his junior and senior years at the Stern School of Business at NYU, is working on analyzing web content from an editorial perspective.  Han-Hsuan Liu expects to get his MS in Electrical Engineering from Columbia in December and is working on some new, more valuable ways to present aggregated blog content on web pages.  Both Hiren and Han are off to quick starts and we're confident and excited that they will deliver tremendous value over the next couple of months.  I will provide a full report in August.