Thomson concentrate on info specialisation

Thomson is sharpening the focus of its business intelligence services and moving out of the general business information market. News services will now be integrated with solutions developed to fit within the workflow of specific job roles.

Thomson Business Intelligence (TBI) was created when Thomson Dialog was split in two in January 2005 creating a separate department for news aggregation aimed at professionals. The TBI Broker Research and Insite services will now come under the wing of Thomson Financial. NewsEdge and TBI Market Research are on the market, while the TBI News Research service will be discontinued from the end of this year, its content available to customers through other Thomson platforms.

In a statement, Thomson said, “We can’t speculate on timing, potential buyers or their plans for the NewsEdge and TBI Market Research services at this time.” NewsEdge provides personalised news feeds from 11,000 global news and business information sources. Market Research (branded Profound) allowed enterprises to track competitors and market share, for example, through access to 5000 new market research and financial reports a month.

A spokesperson for Thompson told IWR , “We have launched some very specialised news services, such as Thompson Merger News and Thompson Investment Management News; solutions sold into the investment banking space have dedicated news tailored to that sector. Business intelligence services aimed at the City are much too general. The solution needs to suit how a trader or a fund manager works.

“This generic news service within business information just didn’t fit with the model. The company is now six business units aligning to the way our professional customers work in each sector and fitting within their workflow.”

He added, “We have exited a lot of perfectly good businesses that did not fit our strategy, for example Thompson Media.”

The generic news service market is experiencing pressure from the likes of Google and the Thompson spokesperson acknowledges the need to respond to these pressures: “I would say this move is symptomatic of the market.”

Thomson said it was too early to tell how or whether jobs will be affected. Business Intelligence Services employs around 200 people.

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