Bristol, UK; Beaverton, Oregon, USA. Partnership provides publishers with a user-friendly hosted service to visualize and explore the often complex relationships between libraries, departments, universities and consortia.
Ringgold and DataSalon are pleased to announce a major new service to aid publishers in visualizing customer hierarchies, following a strategic partnership agreed in March 2009 between the two companies. DataSalon’s MasterVision platform has now been significantly enhanced with the addition of an interactive hierarchy viewer, providing academic publishers with a highly visual ‘family tree’ view of Ringgold’s entire Identify Database.
Ringgold and DataSalon are both specialist suppliers to the academic publishing industry, and work together closely for many major publishers, including Oxford University Press in the UK and the American Medical Association in the USA. Ringgold creates and maintains Identify, a hierarchical reference database of organizations subscribing to academic journals, including essential information about location, size, and subject specialties. Identify provides extensive coverage of more than 150,000 academic, healthcare, government and corporate organizations worldwide, including all of the various parent/child relationships between them.
DataSalon’s MasterVision is a web-based system which provides publishers with ‘complete customer insight’ – it integrates every source of customer information held by a publisher (including subscribers, authors, alert recipients and usage reports) into a user-friendly web interface that includes flexible search, segmentation, visualization and reporting tools. MasterVision has been designed and built specifically for the needs of academic publishers, and the new hierarchy viewer is fully integrated into the product.
The relationships between libraries, departments, universities and consortia form a fundamental part of the sales operation for all major academic publishers, with consortia agreements and other ‘big deals’ providing a significant proportion of revenues. However, existing publisher systems provide little support for searching and viewing these complex relationships between different levels of customer. By combining the rich data of Identify with MasterVision’s hierarchy viewer, publishers will be able to understand the relationships between direct sales and ‘big deals’ more clearly than ever before, and so create more effective plans for pricing, prospecting, cross-selling, and renewals.
James Culling, Client Director of DataSalon said: “We know that many publishers are finding it difficult to get to grips with the interplay between direct sales and ‘big deals’, and how these two selling activities can overlap and affect each other. In tackling this problem head-on with a strongly visual approach, and with Ringgold’s data as a firm reference point, we are very excited about giving publishers a much better understanding of this challenging area.”
Helen Henderson, VP Marketing, Research and Development of Ringgold commented: “We are very impressed by the way DataSalon has really brought to life the complex relationships between different entities within our Identify Database. The combination of our own detailed customer data with friendly visualization and analysis tools will provide sales and marketing teams with a whole new level of insight.”
For more information, please contact:
– Helen Henderson – helen@ringgold.com +1 (352) 436 4131
– James Culling, Client Director, DataSalon Email: info@datasalon.com Phone: +44 (0)1865 321353
About DataSalon
DataSalon is based in Oxford, England and specialises in providing flexible and powerful tools for data integration and analysis which are also extremely user-friendly and easy to implement. DataSalon’s MasterVision system provides a fully-managed and hosted service for integrating, searching and analysing large volumes of customer data. DataSalon has a strong existing client base in the publishing industry, including Oxford University Press, BMJ Group, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and JISC Collections.
About Ringgold
Ringgold is based in Beaverton, OR Crystal River, FL and Bristol, England. Its mission is to help publishers and software vendors improve their marketing and reduce their costs in supplying products and services within the Information industry. Ringgold’s two branded services are OpenIdentify – providing unique identification of organizations subscribing to academic journals, and OpenRFP – providing an online eProcurement system where software vendors present functions to libraries that use the information for creating RFIs or requests for tender. www.ringgold.com