InfoUSA Outlines Potential of Microsoft BCentral Arrangement
The agreement between Microsoft’s bCentral, could be worth millions of dollars within a few years, according to infoUSA officials.
Under the terms of the partnership, bCentral will offer infoUSA.com’s functions in a private label section of bCentral, (http://www.bcentral.com), a small-business focused site that incorporates the functions of infoUSA.com. The terms of the agreement–whether Microsoft is paying an annual fee to infoUSA or is taking a percentage of the sales–were not released.
The agreement calls for bCentral’s list and data services to be powered by infoUSA’s business-to-business and consumer databases, thereby exposing infoUSA’s offerings to a wide variety of small end-users.
“We cannot get everything on our own, so we went through our channel partners to really penetrate deeply,” said Vinod Gupta, infoUSA’s founder and CEO. Microsoft agreed to partner with InfoUSA after examining the breadth and depth of its data without even putting out a request for proposals, he added.
Gupta is not afraid of cannibalization between bCentral and his company’s own sales efforts. He anticipates that there are between 12 and 15 million potential users for the list selection product, including salespeople, CEOs and business owners.
Currently, infoUSA serves 4 million small business customers, according to Monica Messer, the company’s chief information officer and president of its data group.
Eventually bCentral’s offerings will be incorporated into upcoming releases of Microsoft Office, a package of industrial software that currently includes Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint in its basic offering, with other capabilities bundled into different suites.
“Through it, you will be able to link to bCentral and get your sales leads,” Messer said. “Often small businesses do mailings once or twice a year, but if this is part of their office suite, might they be more likely to do them on a regular basis?”
Plans call for bCentral to eventually offer links to lettershop services, file enhancement and data mining services. The initial promotion rollout date is Sept. 29.
