Without much fanfare Dun & Bradstreet acquired Vancouver Business Intelligence company Indicee earlier this year. While it didn’t register as massive news then, what’s newsworthy about the acquisition today is that the D&B Cloud Innovation Center will soon be opening a new downtown Vancouver office and creating 100 new jobs.
The Vancouver team has been kept 100% intact. Founder Mark Cunningham’s growth plans are focused on continuing to build cloud-based analytics software and their platform. Building it on top of the world’s largest B2B database and being able to work with and a global customer base, is a significant reason behind the deal happening.
For most data nerds the prospect of working with over 235 million business records, 30,000 sources of data, from over 200 countries, and is updated 5 million times a day has to get the propeller spinning. Working with a company that has 173 years of history, and Vancouver being the hub that’s defining a new data legacy with his original team has Cunningham fired up. “It’s really still like being a startup within a company of 4600 global employees.” he said
This is about being at the centre of how IT is being consumerized. Cunningham, shared that “on one hand there’s a younger workforce who are data savvy and have high expectations of what their technology should be able to do. Yet there are also users who simply want to press a button to make magic happen. In the end it’s all about building rich experiences, around being able to move data around and have it tell valuable stories.”
A history lesson also made our conversation that much more engaging. Not many companies can claim having had four past US Presidents including Abraham Lincoln work for them. It’s a company history going back to the first California gold rush the original business model was about connecting New York money with those new businesses whose creditworthiness needed vouching for. Imagine the days where horsepower literally drove the business model.
This is more than just a business deal that’s creating another outpost development shop. Having D&B fully commit to making something exceptional happen in Vancouver was essential for Cunningham. A whole new partner and 3rd party developer ecosystem is on the horizon. There’s thinking from the leadership team that staging a business data hackathon sometime in 2015 also has significant merit.
As Cunningham shared, they’ve got “the startup thing going on, with the big company budget” to support all of their efforts to connect at an even deeper level locally. With needing to add 100 new developers with a wide range of skill-sets, they are hitting the recruiting trail hard as well. It might not be the ushering in of a new tech gold rush. But, the prospects for Vancouver’s tech community are certainly much richer with a business intelligence and data driven cloud innovation centre growing up in it’s midst.