DATA INTELLIGENCE: The whole package.

Publication: Data Strategy

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COPYRIGHT 2006 Centaur Publishing Ltd.

Data shops that have so far focused on providing insight to their clients are now looking at supplying prospect data into the bargain. But does this make perfect business sense, or present a conflict of interest? By David Reed

Would you pay #85m for a list-broking company? Unlikely. If that company owned a piece of database management software, would the price look more tempting? Perhaps. What if it had a business model you could export to any country in the world, allowing you to expand your proposition globally? Definitely.

Experian's decision to acquire ClarityBlue for a substantial sum surprised many in the data industry, not least because it appeared to overvalue the business. With a multiple on earnings of around 18-fold, it would take a long time for the acquisition to pay for itself in its current form.

But the likelihood is that Experian has seen more than that in its new property. ClarityBlue's lead proposition is its end-to-end marketing solution, offering a technology platform for customer data management allied to services. One of these is the sourcing of prospect data, which it licenses from the most appropriate sources.

Before its buyout, the company stressed that it acted as an objective adviser, without prejudice about which datasets it would recommend. It...

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