Factiva Sets New Standard for Sales Productivity Solutions; New Produc

    Business Editors

    NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 25, 2005--Factiva(R), a Dow Jones and Reuters Company, today launched two solutions to help global enterprises drive revenue performance, improve sales effectiveness, and develop successful customer relationships. Factiva SalesWorks(SM) and Factiva Companies & Executives(SM) combine Factiva's unrivalled collection of global news and business information with comprehensive information about companies, executives, and industries from leading publishers around the world.
    "In today's fiercely competitive environment - where products and services are no longer the only differentiator - strong customer relationships have never been more important," says Clare Hart, president and CEO of Factiva. "When a sales executive can demonstrate knowledge that supports and increases her customer's productivity, she will win and keep business. Factiva SalesWorks and Factiva Companies & Executives will help her understand her customer's issues by combining timely, relevant news with the most up-to-date company and executive information, enabling her to build that relationship."
    Factiva SalesWorks is a role-based application specifically created to help sales executives prepare and sell more effectively. Factiva SalesWorks provides users with a snapshot of a particular company or executive and allows them to quickly identify and qualify prospects with in-depth company information, executive biographies, dynamic prospecting lists, relevant competitor analysis, and highly targeted news coverage.
    The interface design for Factiva SalesWorks is based on observations of how sales people work, and feedback from Factiva's global customer base, which includes 82% of the global Fortune 500. Customers frequently discussed the challenge of improving the effectiveness of their sales teams, while not overloading them with unnecessary information. The Factiva SalesWorks interface addresses this challenge by centralizing the key information sales professionals require on a day-to-day basis.
    Factiva Companies & Executives provides access to the same comprehensive content collection as Factiva SalesWorks, and is designed for business, marketing and information professionals who require more flexibility and control over their searching. Through a single interface, this professional business research tool delivers the key information sources organizations need to identify business opportunities, understand risks and threats, and monitor emerging markets, competitors, customers and prospects. Factiva Companies & Executives, a standalone product, seamlessly links to Factiva.com.
    Consistent with Factiva's philosophy of integrating key information where and when it is required, both offerings can be integrated into everyday applications. Factiva's application programming interface, Factiva Developer's Kit, enables easy integration of Factiva SalesWorks or Factiva Companies & Executives into enterprise applications such as sales force automation tools, third-party or in-house portals, intranets and Microsoft Office(R) 2003.
    Both solutions also provide automated monitoring and alerting, and advanced searching, and are the only offerings that allow RICS, ticker symbols or D-U-N-S(R) numbers to be used interchangeably. Factiva's proprietary taxonomy, Factiva Intelligent Indexing(TM), which underpins all Factiva solutions, enables these key fields to be seamlessly mapped, resulting in only relevant information being returned in search results.
    In addition, Factiva SalesWorks and Factiva Companies & Executives deliver access to the most credible and targeted news and business information. More than 60% of Factiva's business-critical content is not available on the free Web, and the remaining 40% is simply unavailable anywhere in an aggregated, readily-searchable format.
    Factiva's sales productivity solutions are the only offerings in the market to provide business-critical content from news providers such as Dow Jones (NYSE: DJ) and Reuters (Nasdaq: RTRSY, LSE: RTR) the global information company, and business information from Reuters Fundamentals, Bureau van Dijk, Standard and Poor's, Mergent, Investext, Thomson Financial, Jobson's, Datamonitor, Marquis Who's Who, Freedonia, IBISWorld Business Information, Forrester Research, MarketResearch.com, Hoover's, D&B, and others.

    About Factiva(R)

    Factiva, a Dow Jones & Reuters Company, provides essential business news and information together with the content delivery tools and services that enable professionals to make better decisions faster. Factiva's unrivalled collection of over 9,000 credentialed sources includes the exclusive combination of The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Dow Jones and Reuters newswires and the Associated Press, as well as Reuters Fundamentals, D&B, and Bureau van Dijk company profiles.
    Factiva's innovative, XML-based and Web services-enabled technology platform provides access to this rich content collection via Factiva's role-specific products or through customized enterprise, group or personal solutions. Executives, information professionals, marketers, salespeople, and other professionals can easily monitor and understand the latest news, market trends, and business challenges relevant to them - directly from the Microsoft Office and job-specific applications they use every day.

    For more information visit: www.factiva.com/press.

    About Reuters

    Reuters (www.reuters.com), the global information company, provides indispensable information tailored for professionals in the financial services, media and corporate markets. Our information is trusted and drives decision making across the globe based on our reputation for speed, accuracy and independence. We have 14,700 staff in 92 countries, including some 2,300 editorial staff in 197 bureaux serving approximately 130 countries, making Reuters the world's largest international multimedia news agency. In 2003, the Reuters Group had revenues of GBP 3.2 billion.

    About Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing

    Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing (BvDEP) is one of Europe's leading publishers of electronic business information. The company has 19 offices worldwide. BvDEP is best known for its range of company information products that combines multiple high quality data sources with flexible software to allow users to manipulate data for research, analysis, benchmarking and marketing intelligence. Products include OSIRIS, ISIS, ORBIS, FAME, DIANE, AMADEUS and BANKSCOPE. www.bvdep.com.

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CONTACT: Factiva Global Public Relations - UKI, CEMA, APAC Factiva, a Dow Jones & Reuters Company Melanie Surplice, +44 207 542 8837 Fax: +44 207 542 6686 Mob: +44 799 056 1117 melanie.surplice@factiva.com or Factiva Global Public Relations Jason Ripper, +1 609-627-2312 jason.ripper@factiva.com or Hill and Knowlton for Factiva Kirsty Whitehead, +44 207 413 3043 Kirsty.whitehead@hillandknowlton.com

KEYWORD: NEW YORK INDUSTRY KEYWORD: PUBLISHING PRODUCT SOURCE: Factiva

Copyright Business Wire 2005