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
June 2014
www.freepint.com © Free Pint Limited 2014

^ Back to Contents | www.freepint.com © Free Pint Limited 2014- 2 -
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
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Reports
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 8837
scott.lutter@avention.com

Introduction & Contact Details
Introduction: Company and Product
Avention 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 Details
Avention 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: sales@avention.com
Website: www.avention.com
Twitter: @AventionInc
Follow the links on the tabs for other office locations.
By Chris Porter
View author biography

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:
ƒƒ Thomson Reuters (for global company data and analyst reports)
ƒƒ D&B (for European, Asian, Latin American and African company coverage)
ƒƒ Morningstar (for annual reports and SEC filings)
ƒƒ ICC (UK, Irish and European company coverage)
ƒƒ Experian (UK-registered public and private company data)
ƒƒ Freedonia (industry segment market research)
ƒƒ LexisNexis (corporate family hierarchies)
ƒƒ 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:
ƒƒ United States - 16 million
ƒƒ United Kingdom - 4.6 million
ƒƒ Canada - 1.4 million
ƒƒ China - 497,000
ƒƒ Germany - 261,000
ƒƒ France - 258,000
ƒƒ Italy - 188,000
ƒƒ India - 111,000
ƒƒ Russian Federation - 104,000
ƒƒ 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

As a minimum you might expect to find:
ƒƒ Contact details
ƒƒ Information on the company type
ƒƒ Industry classifications
ƒƒ Numbers of employees
ƒƒ Corporate hierarchy information where appropriate
ƒƒ Basic financials
ƒƒ 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 Financials
The section of links to financial information may include, for quoted companies:
ƒƒ Links to financial reports in both standardised and as-reported formats
ƒƒ Annual ratios and ratio comparisons with industry benchmarks
ƒƒ Credit reports (again for US companies only)
ƒƒ Snapshot and historical stock information
ƒƒ Business segment information
ƒƒ 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 & Analysis
A“News & Analysis”section of links potentially offers:
ƒƒ “Signals”and“triggers”(both described in more detail below)
ƒƒ SEC filings
ƒƒ News
ƒƒ Earnings call and other investor transcripts
ƒƒ Records of significant developments
ƒƒ 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 Types
An“Industry Snapshot”link, also to the left of the screen, provides:
ƒƒ A high-level summary of an industry
ƒƒ Information on sub-sectors
ƒƒ A list of key companies in the industry, with links to their profiles
ƒƒ A“movers and shakers”section identifying key executives
ƒƒ A section“what’s affecting the market?”
ƒƒ Some talking points about the industry
ƒƒ Definitions of industry buzzwords
ƒƒ 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.

Technology
Avention 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 Interactions
Avention 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.
ƒƒ 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.
ƒƒ 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

ƒƒ 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.
ƒƒ 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 Filtering
The 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 Alerts
The 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 Support
User 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 Value
Avention 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 Offerings
Avention, 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: Value
In 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 8837
scott.lutter@avention.com

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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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