Continuing to Expand Insights That Help Guide Intelligent Actions
According to a recent Gartner report, Top 10 Trends in Data and Analytics, 2020, “The combinatory power of more sophisticated and complex analytics, on a greater variety of data, has become more strategic and central to the creative thinking required to innovate our way beyond the post-COVID-19 world of global uncertainty and change.”
As our clients know, Dun & Bradstreet works continuously to deliver that greater variety of data and associated analytics by expanding the insights we can deliver on businesses around the world. Our commercial, government, and not-for-profit clients look to our data, insights, and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven platforms to drive intelligent actions.
We recently reached a significant milestone: Coverage of global businesses in the Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud now surpasses 400 million! It is gratifying to know that we continue to deliver the broadest available set of business-to-business (B2B) data and insights to help organizations grow and thrive.
The Gartner report goes on to state, “An ever-increasing velocity and scale of analysis – in terms of both processing and access – is required to succeed in the face of unimaginable market shifts.” The expansion of our Data Cloud comes at a time when making data-driven decisions and leveraging analytics has never been more important. We are excited to offer clients access to the most comprehensive reference data on businesses across the globe. This foundation, along with our AI-driven software platforms powered by the Data Cloud, will be critical for clients as they make decisions and plan actions for recovery and growth in a post-COVID-19 world.
The additional insights into businesses – especially small and emerging businesses – which the growth of our Data Cloud represents, enable clients to drive intelligent actions around a greater portion of their customer bases, supplier bases, jurisdictions, or target markets. These actions can lead to a competitive edge, growth, or better government outcomes.
Back in April, we advised that since the start of 2019, we had grown the number of businesses in the Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud to 355 million. Work accelerated – even through COVID-19 – as 2020 progressed, resulting in Dun & Bradstreet being the first B2B data provider to deliver information on over 400 million businesses from around the globe.
In fact, over the past two years, we have grown the number of businesses in the Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud by 33%. The majority of growth was from the discovery and addition of small and emerging businesses across the globe. Coverage of entities in China, India, and Brazil saw the most significant expansion during this period, though coverage of companies in almost all regions of the world grew.
Leveraging our 20+ years of experience in AI, we created a new AI engine to help source company information in China. We more than doubled our coverage of businesses in China over the past two years, fueled by this industry-leading and proprietary AI engine that addresses local language translation.
Since February 2019, Dun & Bradstreet has leaned into a customer-first approach to prioritize our data expansion work. Client input guided the regions of focus and the emphasis on expanding coverage of emerging and small businesses. The vast expansion in the area of small and emerging businesses in North America and across the globe extends our already significant coverage of privately held companies. And of course, the global nature of the Data Cloud is a Dun & Bradstreet strength, supported by our strict governance approach, which ensures that all data in the Data Cloud adheres to the same standards of quality and consistency.
Sales and marketing clients continue to rely on us to help them gain a competitive edge and grow their businesses. Contact data is especially important for these clients. Over the past two years, we tripled our coverage of contact data in the Data Cloud and leveraged our market-leading Customer Data Platform in two recently launched new offers: D&B Connect (to simplify data management) and D&B Account-Based Marketing.
As we look ahead to 2021, we will of course continue to advance all aspects of the Data Cloud, including analytical insights and alternative data.
More on Our Data Cloud
The Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud offers the world’s most comprehensive B2B data and analytical insights. The Data Cloud is created on a foundation of public data from tens of thousands of sources and tens of millions of websites.
Building on this vast library of collected information, we layer other trusted sources and Dun & Bradstreet proprietary data. These include data collected from our long-standing trade program, which collects payment and accounts receivable data from companies around the globe; data from the Extreme Risk Consortium; data that customers provide; and more. Our data scientists use our current data and our historical archives of data to perform rich and sophisticated modeling, creating ratings and scores around business activity and financial health.
The Data Cloud also offers deep insights into all types of relationships among companies, identifying millions of relationships that can guide intelligent actions. We leverage information from our global sources, along with proprietary capabilities, to discover and curate millions of B2B relationships – i.e., family trees. We continuously monitor the dynamic changes to these relationships, including corporate actions such as mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures, and make relevant updates.
Data and insights from the Data Cloud are available directly (via API) or through our range of AI-driven SaaS platforms. Thousands of companies of all sizes around the world leverage Dun & Bradstreet to empower intelligent actions, support their strategic objectives, and gain a competitive edge.
Other Data Cloud advancements over the past two years include:
- Coverage of entities in China, India, and Brazil saw significant expansion, though coverage in almost all regions of the world grew.
- We more than doubled our coverage of entities in China, supported by a new AI engine that was created to help with sourcing company information.
- Hierarchical connections and linkages between entities remains a strength; we also developed an AI-driven tool to enable a customer to identify types of connections that are most meaningful to their business.
The new leadership brought in as part of the firm’s “go private” in February 2019 prioritized a renewed focus on data discovery, resulting in the development of tools and methods – many expanding on the firm’s long history of AI use. It is this renewed focus that accelerated our ability to discover, validate, and add new businesses, ultimately resulting in the rapid Data Cloud growth that now brings our customers over 400 million businesses.
Here for You
Dun & Bradstreet takes seriously our responsibility to provide our clients with the insights they need to improve their business and mission performance. Forward-thinking organizations around the world trust the Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud for category-leading data, insights, and the AI-driven platforms it powers to guide winning strategies and intelligent actions. We are at the heart of these organizations’ key initiatives, and we’re the difference that helps them grow revenue, increase margins, mitigate risk, and retain compliance.