in good company.(Company overview)

Byline: Tim Buckley Owen

in good company

With 40 million companies on Bureau van Dijk's Orbis database and 30 million on OneSource, the size of the company, business and financial information field is clearly enormous. There are plenty of providers, too, with more than 90 official company registers online, plus scores of sources on financials and annual reports, mergers and acquisitions, stock market and share prices, and more.

"Business information vendors have seen a great deal of consolidation over the past 10 years," says Neil Infield of the British Library's Business and Intellectual Property Centre. "Thomson Financial appeared to be about to swallow up most of the players at one point. However, some of the older suppliers such as BvD, D&B and Perfect Information survived the shake-up and are still going strong."

top seeds

The big players in the sector are Thomson Financial, LexisNexis and Factiva, with BvD, D&B and OneSource some way behind, according to the latest Business Information Resources Survey, which polls a panel of experienced business information users. The latest survey shows they put the available services to a wide range of uses.

The survey's compiler, Allan Foster, says: "While none of our respondents describe themselves as C1 professionals, 55% say they provide competitor information as part of their wider function. A clear majority A- 75% A- of our respondents are involved with the provision of information or research services to support compliance work of one kind or another."