December 1, 2005

Today, Onvia announces the offering of a new Personnel History Link (PHL) embedded in B2B and B2G Onvia Business Builder (B2B B2G OBB) that provides users with access to prospective client information so they can gain better knowledge about contacts and people within their government agencies of interest.

The B2B and B2G personnel features include contact work history, education, current position and other business affiliations, leading to networking opportunities and added insight about how to reach out to potential customers.

Based on the idea that people can be connected through common associates and associations, via degrees of separation between contacts, the Personnel History Link strengthens Onvia Business Builder’s ability to provide comprehensive business intelligence and data that surrounds public sector business opportunities.

“We believe a successful sales and marketing strategy relies on having relevant business personnel information available anytime, anywhere.

Our users already rely on us for targeted sales intelligence, including business opportunities, multi-faceted research and project histories,” said Mike Pickett, CEO of Onvia.

“It’s only natural that we now provide even more contact details to help them win contracts in the government marketplace.

Companies want to know something about their prospective clients before contacting them, and the new Personnel History Link provides just that kind of valuable data to give our users an extra edge in connecting with government buyers.”

While other features of Onvia Business Builder provide information about who to call regarding sales opportunities, the Personnel History Link adds specific information about who these people are.

Currently, companies rely on limited online resources and publications, as well as networking to build these connections.

The Personnel History Link transforms a name on a computer screen to a person with an employment history, association memberships, and hobbies, thus allowing Onvia users to establish a quicker, more strategic business rapport with prospective clients.

In order to add this enhancement to Onvia Business Builder, Onvia partnered with ZoomInfo, a unique summarization search engine that finds, understands and extracts the latest online information about people and companies.

ZoomInfo’s patented search technology continually scans millions of Web sites, press releases, electronic news services, SEC filings and other online sources, and results in concise summaries of more than 27 million people and two million companies.

Onvia Business Builder is a new product that enables businesses of all sizes to compete more effectively in the fast-growing government procurement marketplace.

Onvia Business Builder provides access to detailed information on over 2.3 million contracting related opportunities from across 65,400 government agencies representing 194,000 buyers and 178,000 government contractors nationwide.

The product leverages Onvia’s massive proprietary database of historical information gathered from local, state and federal government agencies and education purchasing entities over the last seven years to help businesses evaluate and respond to new bid requests and RFPs, and capture more government business.

Onvia Business Builder expands upon Onvia’s existing product, the successful Onvia Guide. The Guide is a daily bulletin delivered to over 26,000 customers that provides bid notices, requests for proposals and contracting opportunities customized to specific industry categories and locations.

While the Guide presents actionable government sales opportunities sorted by category and relevancy, Onvia Business Builder provides new dimensions of information on each sales opportunity from both historical and real-time perspectives, including project history, agency research, buyer research and competitive intelligence.

The sales intelligence available through Onvia Business Builder is derived from Onvia’s deep understanding of the government procurement process, coupled with the application of innovative data collection and content management technology.

Onvia covers opportunities in industries such as architecture, engineering, construction and information technology, among others.

Source: Onvia