Today, I add Alacra to the 50 Content Companies that Matter.
Alacra is a content aggregator, serving sell-side financial institutions, large consulting firms and law firms. Founded by Steve Goldstein, Mike Angle and a team of their former Knight Ridder colleagues, Alacra has quietly focused on delivering quality solutions to their clients for more than nine years.
At the heart of Alacra’s business is their Concordance database. Early on, Alacra realized that the opportunity for them was to do the “dirty work” of matching data from various data providers so that their customers can easily integrate content from many sources. Data matching is always more complex than it seems. Even public company data, where you can leverage ticker symbols or CUSIPs is complex. Matching private companies, people or bond issues, where common identifiers are lacking, is difficult and labor-intensive.
As a result, customers have come to rely on Alacra to provide cross-vendor data integration. Today, Alacra has integrated thousands of data elements from more than 100 content providers.
Having spoken to many Alacra customers, one other element is clear. Alacra is highly focused on customer satisfaction. Their reputation for delivering quality work on schedule is unmatched in this segment of the market. Their customers consistently rave about their delivery and communication throughout.
Alacra’s absolute focus on data concordance and customer satisfaction would be enough to add them to this list. But there’s a second, equally compelling reason to do so. The Alacra team are very attuned to the changes going on in the content business. Steve Goldstein’s Alacra Blog was one of the first b2b CEO blogs published. Just recently, they’ve launched the Alacra Wiki, one of the first vertical-market b2b wiki. Last month, Alacra launched the Alacra Store, a pay-per-view portal bringing together vast amounts of content from many content providers. This should open up Alacra to new customers outside of its core institutional base. Alacra continues to explore new technologies, media and methods to serve its customers needs.
With a strong and growing core business, a focus on customer excellence, and the courage to test new concepts, Alacra clearly is one of the 50 Content Companies that Matter.
Author’s note: Leadership Directories is a content partner of Alacra.
