A NASDAQ listed US firm is planning the audacious task of building a database of every single UK business from a satellite location in Manchester.
InfoUSA, which is headquartered in Nebraska, has announced that it is aiming to create the UK’s first-ever definitive business data source, logging information such as management names, numbers of employees, web addresses and trading names. It aims to do this with a standalone operation – utilising no outsourcing – from an as yet unnamed location in the city.
The firm will obtain the information from publicly available sources, augmented by between two and three million telephone calls a year.
On the ground in Manchester the news has been met largely with a mixture of surprise and disbelief; so huge is the task at hand.
Quentin Ashby
Quentin Ashby, MD of web evaluation and research firm Virtual Surveys, registered his astonishment, as he noted: “They’re going to be facing a real struggle to do this.
“If the information they gather is going to be used for research or marketing purposes (as indeed it will) then the problem is going to be ensuring they get hold of the names and details for the right individuals.
“If they have the resources and the staff they might not find it too much of a problem to get names, but if they’re trying to get millions of direct telephone numbers, instead of switchboards, or personal emails – rather than just ‘info @'s - then that’s a mammoth challenge, a huge task.”
Other members of the research industry cautioned that, even if they succeeded in gathering the information, the crux of the problem would be keeping it up to date.
“If the information’s not current it’s not valuable,” one remarked, “and with a task of this scale it’s going to be like painting the Humber Bridge: as soon as you’re finished you’d be starting all over again. If not before.”
Stormy Dean, infoUSA’s chief financial officer, was unavailable to comment at the time of writing. However, it’s known that the firm - which employs 600 full time employees in the US, making some 20 million phone surveys a year – values its reputation for accuracy highly and currently spends $50 million a year keeping its databases as up to date as possible. On the firm’s website it boasts of servicing 4 million customers.
As soon as How-Do finds out more about the planned Manchester operation we’ll keep you informed.
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