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Dow Jones’ EMG Acquires Generate
By Ned May
April 21, 2008
Important Details: On April 17, Dow Jones‘ Enterprise Media Group (EMG) division announced it had acquired the business intelligence and business development company Generate. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Generate co-founder Tom Aley will lead a newly formed business unit within EMG titled Business & Relationship Intelligence (BRI) as senior vice president and managing director, while co-founder Darr Aley will become vice president, marketing and business development. The new BRI unit will focus on serving information products targeted at enterprise functional areas including sales, marketing and compliance that had previously not been a main line of business within EMG. Dow Jones Salesworks and Companies and Executives products have been moved into the new BRI unit. All Generate employees will join Dow Jones, though the Generate staff focused on financial wealth management clients will join the Content Technology Solutions business unit.
The acquisition of Generate brings Dow Jones EMG three unique parts: a stand-alone business, new technology, and new content. The business and leadership of Generate will form the core of BRI and significantly accelerate EMG’s growth in and breadth of offerings for enterprise clients. The technology and content will be utilized across EMG. The technology that Generate brings is threefold - patented web crawling; content entity extraction and categorization (harvesting) plus relationship mapping; and event triggers, the next generation of news alerts. This technology will be deployed to complement both Dow Jones-created content and aggregated content. Event triggers will also be deployed across many of the “intelligent portals” the company is deploying at targeted functional roles.
Though there was overlap across some customers and partners, EMG does not see this as a negative, viewing the two businesses as complementary and pleased with the positive customer reaction. In an interview with Outsell, Clare Hart, president of Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group, summed up the acquisition this way: “It’s the perfect injection of technology to enrich our existing offerings and accelerate our development of powering the intelligent enterprise by two to three years.”
Implications: Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group’s tag line of “empowering the intelligent enterprise” is as aptly applied to the company’s management as it is to its product lines. This acquisition of Generate reassures customers and employees of Factiva that the company’s near term future is sound, as it’s unlikely News Corp would approve this acquisition if it intended to divest Factiva or the entire EMG group. Instead, it positions Factiva and EMG extremely well for the coming years.
The tremendous flood of free information flowing into the hands of enterprise users from the likes of Google could have dealt a fatal blow to the traditional licensed aggregator market segment. But instead, the traditional aggregators such as Factiva and LexisNexis have weathered the impact and are now beginning to flourish again by layering on new technologies and approaches that further refine their own information offerings to provide desparately needed productivity and effectiveness gains for their enterprise clients. Sure, a researcher can go to the open web and gain access to millions of articles and pages related to a topic of interest, but it is increasingly clear that the time spent sifting through that information is at a huge cost despite the ease and speed for which it can be obtained. Outsell data shows that between 2001 and 2007 professionals have suffered a 6.1% productivity loss calculated from the additional time they spend just looking for information before they can do anything with it!
Dow Jones’ EMG is on the leading edge of the group of content providers that are evolving to meet this challenge. This acquisition extends Dow Jones’ content offerings from creation and aggregation to include intelligently harvested business intelligence off the web. Many enterprise users will evaluate these services and become convinced that the productivity and effectiveness gains of these Generate-enhanced, role-based EMG services will more than justify the cost of the subscription.
Over the last several years Outsell has witnessed a flurry of acquisitions by enterprise information providers aimed at extending their offerings deeper into their customers’ workflow. While we’ve seen an abatement in these deals in recent times, we now also expect to see more acquisitions like this one of Generate, which is as much about technology as it is about content. Once the domain of the major software and web search engines, publishers are now recognizing that technology-rich and information focused acquisitions can deliver considerable advantages over years-long and risk-prone internal development. We doubt this this particular deal would have been possible prior to Dow Jones’ acquisition by News Corp, and see this type of acquisition as critical to the future of the firm. The new Generate business, content, and technology will be highly leveraged across all of EMG going forward. Firms sharing characteristics with EMG are well advised to look for Generate-like targets of their own.