FreePint Review of Avention

In-depth, independent review of the product, plus links to related resources

“...a global B2B database of information relating to companies and individuals which is aimed in particular at sales and marketing professionals and researchers...”

Product Review of Avention

FreePint Report: Product Review of Avention

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June 2014

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Contents

Introduction & Contact Details 4

Sources, Content and Coverage 5

Search, Outputs & Alerts, User Interface & Help 9

Value, Competitors, Development & Pricing 15

About the Reviewer 18


FreePint Report: Product Review of Avention (ISBN 978-1-78123-151-7) is a FreePint report published by Free Pint Limited.

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Introduction & Contact Details

Introduction: Company and ProductAvention Inc is the new name for the company formerly known as OneSource Information Services.

OneSource was acquired from its former owner Infogroup in October 2012 by private equity company GTCR in partnership with Cannondale.

Avention is also the name for the company’s new flagship product, a global B2B database of information relating to companies and individuals which is aimed in particular at sales and marketing professionals and researchers.

Avention is the successor product to both OneSource Business Browser and the OneSource iSell product range.

The re-branding and new product launch reflect the impact of the company’s new ownership. Find out more in the related FreePint article, Q&A with Avention: New Name, New Application.

Contact DetailsAvention has its headquarters in Concord, Massachusetts in the United States and also has offices in the UK, Australia, Singapore and India.

Corporate HQ:Avention Inc 300 Baker Ave, Concord, MA 01742 USA

Tel (US): 1-978-318-4300 Fax (US): 1-978-318-4690 Email: [email protected] Website: www.avention.com Twitter: @AventionInc

Follow the links on the tabs for other office locations.

By Chris PorterView author biography

http://www.avention.com/

http://web.freepint.com/go/sub/article/69098



mailto:[email protected]

http://www.avention.com/

https://twitter.com/AventionInc

http://www.avention.com/locations/corporate-headquarters/


Avention draws on a very wide range of providers of company, executive and industry information, working with over 60 content partners.

Some of its data is proprietary; some comes from its former parent company Infogroup; and some comes from third-party providers including:

� Thomson Reuters (for global company data and analyst reports)

� D&B (for European, Asian, Latin American and African company coverage)

� Morningstar (for annual reports and SEC filings)

� ICC (UK, Irish and European company coverage)

� Experian (UK-registered public and private company data)

� Freedonia (industry segment market research)

� LexisNexis (corporate family hierarchies)

� And many others.

News information is sourced from Acquire Media and Moreover; the vendor says it draws on over 30,000 news sources, including blogs as well as traditional media publications.

A list of content sources is available on the company’s website together with information about update schedules.

The vendor says it has a team of content managers who get to know its information providers very intimately and learn which of them has the best and most current company data, contact information, email addresses, etc. Company records within the Avention database are built by drawing on this knowledge and constructing a “golden record” out of the best available data.

Avention says it carries data on almost 25 million companies and around 40 million contacts.

Company coverage by country: a search within the product indicated that at the time of writing, the countries with the largest volumes of company coverage were:

� United States - 16 million

� United Kingdom - 4.6 million

� Canada - 1.4 million

� China - 497,000

� Germany - 261,000

� France - 258,000

� Italy - 188,000

� India - 111,000

� Russian Federation - 104,000

� Netherlands - 103,000.

Company snapshot: once a company profile is selected, snapshot information will display in the centre of the screen. The level of detail in a company profile will vary depending on the amount of information available.

Sources, Content and Coverage

http://www.avention.com/advantage/data-sourcing/content-source-providers/


As a minimum you might expect to find:

� Contact details

� Information on the company type

� Industry classifications

� Numbers of employees

� Corporate hierarchy information where appropriate

� Basic financials

� Business description.

For larger companies, further snapshot information may be provided such as names of key executives, with links to their profiles, summary information on significant developments in the last 12 months, recent headlines, a financial summary and a stock snapshot.

Detailed information: further links to the left of the screen provide more detailed information, potentially including further profile-type information such as the corporate family tree, key competitors, contacts, an industry snapshot, an information technology profile (for US companies only) and job listings; then section on news and analysis and on company financials.

Source Content Detail: Company FinancialsThe section of links to financial information may include, for quoted companies:

� Links to financial reports in both standardised and as-reported formats

� Annual ratios and ratio comparisons with industry benchmarks

� Credit reports (again for US companies only)

� Snapshot and historical stock information

� Business segment information

� Annual and interim income statement, balance sheet and cash flow data, again both standardised and as-reported.

Financial data includes five years of history for 2.5 million UK registered companies and up to three years for around 800,000 European Union companies.

Figure 1 gives a sample of as-reported annual income for a US-based quoted company.

Figure 1: As-reported annual income for a US-based quoted company

Avention Sources, Content and Coverage | June 2014


By default, three years of data are shown, but at the click of a button you can switch to a 10-year view. Equally a handy drop-down lets you switch instantly between US dollars, British pounds, Euros or the original reported currency, or change the display between millions and thousands.

Screen layout here, as elsewhere, is very crisp, clean and modern-looking.

A handy button to the top right also lets you toggle between the initial view and a full-screen view, which temporarily hides the company summary information at the top and the links to the left of the screen.

For unquoted companies it should be noted that historical financials are often not available.

Very helpfully, however, for some companies links can be found to annual reports and other filings in PDF format, for instance including filings from Companies House - annual return documents and five years of annual accounts are available on approximately 2.8 million UK companies.

Source Content Detail: News & AnalysisA “News & Analysis” section of links potentially offers:

� “Signals” and “triggers” (both described in more detail below)

� SEC filings

� News

� Earnings call and other investor transcripts

� Records of significant developments

� Links to analyst reports and various tools to help with peer analysis.

Again the range of options presented will vary depending on the amount of data available.

News articles relating to a company are displayed as a series of headlines and article snippets or as full text, depending on the source; clicking on the article headline leads you to more detail, with longer articles from external sites opening up in a new browser window; the service includes some 2,000 full-text sources that do not require a link out. New content is in English language only. (See the separate “Technology” section of this review for comments on searching and filtering within this area.)

“Triggers” provide further use-type information relating to a company. A trigger encapsulates an event such as the filing of earnings results, winning of an award, mergers and acquisitions activity, involvement in a tradeshow or a contract award.

Rather than sending the reader off to look through a potentially large volume of individual news articles, a trigger provides a headline summing up the event, followed by a short summary, plus links to companies and/or contacts associated with the activity.

For larger companies, a separate option is available to see “Significant Developments”, sourced from Thomson Reuters and again giving brief one-paragraph summaries of major events in the life of a company over a longer time period.



Source Content Detail: Other Content TypesAn “Industry Snapshot” link, also to the left of the screen, provides:

� A high-level summary of an industry

� Information on sub-sectors

� A list of key companies in the industry, with links to their profiles

� A “movers and shakers” section identifying key executives

� A section “what’s affecting the market?”

� Some talking points about the industry

� Definitions of industry buzzwords

� Some key information sources relating to the industry, with links off to the publication website.

Based on random sampling, the industry snapshots seem to be available for fairly high-level industry classifications. If the company you are researching is in one of these high-level industries, the snapshot provides a very useful quick introduction for the non-specialist; if the actual industry activity of the company is actually much more granular, the industry snapshot associated with it may be at a much higher level and therefore of less practical use.

Contacts: information on the contacts associated with a company is also available - a notoriously difficult thing to get right and to maintain in a timely manner.

In Avention, contact records sampled typically included information on job role and very useful contact details such as email and phone numbers, plus links to colleagues and associated news “triggers”.

Icons next to the person’s name provide links to other sources of profile information from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google+; clicking on these fires off a name search to the service in question, rather than linking through to a pre-established exact profile match for the person.

FreePint’s View: Sources

ü Wide range of company-related information sources

ü Excellent level of detail and deep history for quoted-company financials

ü Clear, crisp layout

ü Easy-to-use tools for switching display units

ü Access to full-text PDF for quoted-company annual and interim reports and selected UK Companies House documents

û Limited financial history for many unquoted companies

û English-language-only news content.



TechnologyAvention says that while it has used some third-party capabilities, notably a commercial search engine, most of the technology in its product is proprietary. It has developed a significant amount of in-house text analytics, combining it with human expertise during the setup and post-processing phases.

For instance, news content is tagged with companies mentioned in it, based on automatic algorithms; but human beings write the algorithms, check the results and make further refinements.

Search and User InteractionsAvention particularly emphasises a group of four “revolutionary” capabilities which it says mark a business information breakthrough, harnessing big data to help users locate actionable information much more quickly.

� The first of these it calls Conceptual SearchSM. This allows the user to enter a simple text-based search for a concept such as “data breach” or “identity theft”. The system will then bring back a set of results relating to companies, contacts, news articles, industries or triggers which have a relation to the search.

The vendor says there is a significant amount of pre-computation going on to produce this result set. Some of it may be as simple as a free-text match on a company name, but the system will also be combing and weighting textual content and other data, saving the end-user many manual steps.

� The second key capability is called Business SignalsSM, which it says leverages Conceptual Search to provide over a thousand additional business information facets designed to monitor industries, companies, people and topics.

These cover many different aspects of corporate life. Management changes can be tracked to a very granular level, for instance distinguishing a company oversight change from a change of public relations or sales management executive. Changes of ownership covered include divesting, going public, mergers and acquisitions activity or venture financing.

Growth indicators can also be used as signals - options include reported increase or decrease in revenue, profit, assets, liabilities or workforce size. Another intriguing option as the ability to filter by location of activity, narrowing results only to companies which do business in China, India or Brazil, for instance.

The vendor says some of the signals are derived from news articles and press release content, but equally they could be driven by SEC filings, structured data from data providers, or feedback provided by users.

Technology: Search, Outputs & Alerts, User Interface & Help


Avention

Figure 2 shows how signals can be used to filter within results:

Figure 2: Filtering within results The Business Signals can also be used in combination with more traditional ways of screening for companies, such as company size, location and industry classification. Many of these are helpfully expressed as ranges, and clicking in a check-box instantly narrows the results set.

Business Signals can not only be used for filtering within results lists; they are also scored with a percentile score, relative to other companies.

So when you have called up a company profile, you will be able to click a “Signals” link to the left of the screen which will give you a report showing how your target company compares to others in the Avention database.

The signal value is mainly calculated based on activity measured over the last 90 days, though some look at a longer time period, depending on the type of content being analysed and the nature of the signal itself. A 90-day window may be very attractive to a sales and marketing professional, looking for timely reasons to call a prospect, though possibly less useful for a researcher, due to the relatively limited time period which is triggering the results.

For instance a company which, viewed over a longer period, is highly acquisitive may score low on M&A using this method, simply because it happens not to have completed an acquisition in the last 90 days; though for larger companies, insight into that could be gained from the “significant developments” summary in the initial company snapshot.

Note that at present you cannot click through from this signals report to see the underlying activities concerned, though you could quickly get at this information from elsewhere within the product.

Technology: Search, Outputs & Alerts, User Interface & Help | June 2014


� The third of the new capabilities of Avention has brought the market is the Ideal ProfileSM.

This allows a user to assign weightings to Conceptual Search results, further refined through Business Signals.

You can choose from thousands of characteristics that best define the profile, and then decide which of these traits are most important to you by simply adjusting the slider bars next to the relevant item.

Figure 3: Ideal Profile

Once you have established your ideal profile, search results will be assigned a weighting indicating how closely they match your ideal, allowing you to zoom in quickly on the records which most closely match your interests.

You can edit your Ideal Profile at any time, as your needs and interests change.

� The final one of Avention’s four new capabilities is called SmartListsSM.

Once you have used the Conceptual Search, Business Signals and the Ideal Profile, you can then save a resulting set of search results to the Avention SmartList. You can further refine this list by adding or removing individual records or groups of records.

Not only that, but the system will then continue to watch out for further profiles which match your SmartList criteria, allowing you to update your list to reflect the latest view of the world.

Sorting and FilteringThe full range of sorting and filtering possibilities within Avention is vast. Options offered vary depending on the context.

Avention Technology: Search, Outputs & Alerts, User Interface & Help | June 2014


SmartLists, for example, can be displayed in a variety of ways, including a neat “company grid” view, which then supports further sorting of the list by attributes such as revenue, assets or number of employees.

Or contact search results can be filtered based on attributes such as a person’s name, job title, job function, education or a search across their biography, among other things.

When searching for news relating to a company, you can enter a keyword search against the headline or full text, set a date range, search for a publication - the most frequently occurring publications are helpfully listed with check-boxes beside them for selection - or choose between shorter or longer articles.

Further refinements to searching can be achieved using a separate set of options relating to triggers.

It is good to see that the news searching capability is fully integrated within the context of the company profile. However some further simplification could be useful here. Results can be refined using an extensive range of industry classifications, but searching across the classifications for a possible match is not as easy as it might be, requiring a series of name lookups within each separate classification when a straight search across them all would be more helpful.

Also other products on the market offer quicker ways of drilling down within news content by industry, region, topic, publication or company, with fewer clicks.

It must be remembered that Avention is a very new product and ongoing enhancements are planned, so minor usability issues such as this can be expected to be addressed in due course.

Outputs and AlertsThe product provides a range of output options, some of them very standard and some of them linked to the more innovative searching and filtering capabilities within Avention.

You can very simply highlight a range of cells from a company financials page and copy and paste it into a spreadsheet application.

From a company snapshot view, you can also click on pre-built options to the left of the screen for a “Valuation Tearsheet” or a “Company Chartbook”.

The former will generate an Excel spreadsheet of key company snapshot information, including summary share price information, key financials and financial ratios over the last three years plus five-year averages and accompanying charts.

The latter will generate a spreadsheet with more extensive share price data over time plus historical data for key financial items such as total revenue, main expense categories, operating income and net profit margin.

Lists can be exported from the application, subject to a few contractual constraints on volumes. Where charts are available in the service (as in the below example showing revenue breakdown across business segments), helpful exporting options can also be invoked such as a “OneStop” summary report.



Figure 4: Revenue breakdown across business segments An attractive range of alerting options is available. You can choose to receive a notification relating to a news change or to another type of trigger event; you can choose to be notified when a particular company data point is modified or an SEC filing is made.

Notifications can be flagged via an icon on the user’s home page desktop at the top right of the service; a visual alert to a new trigger can also be showed next to a company profile; and the user can also opt to receive notifications by email.

The user can also opt to “pin” items to their homepage desktop, which can then become a quick entry point to their current work. Many different kinds of information can be “pinned”, including an individual company profile, contact record for a person, industry information, individual news item, trigger or SmartList.



Figure 5: Homepage

Administration and SupportUser administration information is accessed from the top right of the service. The user can manage their own personal profile details; set preferences for things such as currency; manage notification settings; invite further users to access the service; or associate specific keywords with different kinds of trigger opportunity.

Product help for Avention currently includes hover tips at appropriate points in the service, as well as the feedback button which is constantly accessible from the lower right of the screen. Support for previous OneSource products has also included extensive online help resources and tutorials, and similar things can be expected for Avention.

The vendor offers customer support with US, UK and Asia-Pacific contact numbers and a support email address.

FreePint’s View: Technology

ü Innovative technology, especially for quickly searching across multiple content types

ü Extensive change notification options

ü Useful exporting capabilities

û User interface could be simplified in some areas, such as news-related searching.



Purchasing and ValueAvention says that its new offering can help users to achieve significant time savings compared with more traditional products, potentially saving them days of reading and research.

It says sales, marketing and research professionals alike will all benefit from the Conceptual Search, Business Signals, Ideal Profile and SmartList capabilities (read more about these four capabilities in the third part of the review).

It can otherwise be very difficult and time-consuming to service and maintain a good list of target companies in fast-moving areas which typically will not be covered by any existing industry classification scheme; the Conceptual Search in particular, the vendor says, delivers a “hyper-segmentation” of industry activities with a minimum of clicks.

Sales and marketing professionals can also measure the value of the service directly in terms of metrics such as leads generated or new revenue achieved.

Product Maturity and Development Plan The Avention product was launched in March 2014.

The vendor says that its new product includes all the functionality of its previous iSell and Business Browser products. Existing clients are to be offered the opportunity to transition from either Business Browser or iSell to Avention over time, as they renew their subscriptions.

FreePint has appreciated the opportunity to take a look at the product at such an early stage. Bringing out major new capabilities while fully supporting users of long-established but now legacy services is not an easy trick to pull off, and the initial offering is impressive.

As noted in this review, there are few places where further usability enhancements would be welcome.

Also in testing the product across different browser types, occasional instances of unexpected behaviour were encountered which, no doubt, will be addressed through the post-release bug fix process, as is normal.

The vendor says that a number of future product releases are already planned, for instance to further enhance triggers and business signals.

Emphasis for future releases will be to continue to work with strategic partners and focus on the vendor’s core “personas”, or target user types, to provide more seamless integrations that deliver all the capabilities of Avention throughout the various aspects of the user’s work cycle.

The vendor says it is also working on adding a new series of content relating to spending and payments.

Value, Competitors, Development & Pricing




Pricing Avention pricing is on a per-user basis, with lower prices per seat for enterprise deals involving large numbers of users. While the product is designed as a global one, geographic slices can also be purchased.

There are a handful of add-on functionalities which can affect pricing. For instance, there is a standard cap on the number of records which can be downloaded. However, downloading of very large numbers of company records, most likely to be needed by marketing departments, can be made available for an extra charge. This pricing model is a common one for services of this type.

While the vendor did not wish to disclose actual price points, FreePint believes that an initial research seat of Avention should come in at a higher level than for a Dow Jones Factiva or D&B Hoover’s research subscription, but a lower point than offerings such as Capital IQ, FactSet or Bureau van Dijk.

Competition and Alternative OfferingsAvention, through its OneSource heritage, is a long-established and well-respected player in the company information space.

Its deep, well-structured and well-displayed historical financials on quoted companies certainly remain a strong part of its attraction.

Expect to find more history and more focused functionality here than you would encounter in the company information collections of more news-focused aggregators such as LexisNexis or Dow Jones.

However, if unquoted company financials are your particular thing, a Bureau van Dijk, a Dow Jones Factiva or some more local/national providers will provide Avention with stiff competition.

Global financial information vendors such as FactSet or Capital IQ provide some types of information on quoted companies which Avention does not, such as consensus analyst forecasts or detailed ownership information. However, they are aiming at different user types such as investment management professionals who require different kinds of data and analytics, and their price points duly reflect that.

The general look and feel of Avention are commendable, as are the display, exporting and change notification options.

Other vendors such as Factiva or Hoover’s have been down the “trigger” path before, and some quick side-by-side testing of Avention against one competing vendor during this review showed that this remains an evolving art, with some good and enlightening results from both vendors but with each uncovering useful information which the other’s technology had not picked up.

However, Avention’s new Conceptual Search across multiple content types is certainly a very useful step forward and the overall combination of the various new Avention technology capabilities is an intriguing one.

Value, Competitors, Development & Pricing | June 2014Avention





FreePint’s View: ValueIn FreePint’s view, Avention is a force to be reckoned with as a company information provider. Under its new ownership, it has built on its previous strengths as a provider of deep and well-structured data and has moved pretty quickly to launch an improved user interface and some innovative workflow capabilities, which should make some other vendors look to their laurels.

Different vendors have different strengths in this area and FreePint is looking forward to exploring some of the alternatives in detail as part of a forthcoming collection of reviews examining some other company information vendors, including Dow Jones Factiva and LexisNexis.

No one vendor currently has it all, but Avention looks very well-placed given the strength of the first new offering under its new brand, and given the keen attention its new parent, GTCR, is devoting to it.

Avention Value, Competitors, Development & Pricing | June 2014

This reprint was created from a report originally published in

June 2014 and was accurate as of that date.

Reprinted with the permission of Free Pint Ltd. All other

rights reserved.

For more information contact: Scott Lutter, VP International Sales

+44 (0) 207 382 [email protected]


You can share individual reports and articles with anyone in your organisation, as part of your FreePint Subscription.

This PDF report can be emailed to anyone in your organisation but may only be placed on your intranet or other collaborative workspace if your license level allows. If you have questions about your license level, please contact [email protected].

Chris Porter is director of Porter Walford Consulting, an organisation which specialises in market research, market size and share and competitor analysis relating to the information industry. Clients include some of the world’s leading information-intensive companies.

Chris is the co-author of a forthcoming report on global market size and share for Media Intelligence information and software services.

Chris previously worked for Dow Jones, Factiva and Reuters, analysing B2B and consumer information markets worldwide. Expertise includes corporate and legal, risk and compliance, financial and business and public relations and corporate communications markets.

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