Marketing services company Infogroup, whose services include list management, database marketing, and email marketing among others, announced today the sale of its OneSource division to platform company Cannondale Investments. OneSource provides information about businesses, industries, and executives worldwide.
The sale, for an undisclosed amount and effective as of October 1, comes nearly a year and a half after an internal restructure, overseen by the company’s previous CEO Clare Hart, that positioned OneSource as one of Infogroup’s three divisions: Infogroup for data and marketing services, ORC International for research and consulting practices, and OneSource as a provider of business information.
However, in July 2011, less than three months after that restructuring, Infogroup sold ORC International as “part of an ongoing effort to concentrate resources to the most important areas,” Hart said at the time.
Like the sale of ORC International, Infogroup touts the sale of OneSource as a means for streamlining its core business around developing and delivering data products and services to its clients. “This sale helps create strategic efficiencies for us as we continue in this direction,” said company chairman and CEO Michael Iaccarino in a release. “We will continue to invest in capabilities, such as GoTime and the expansion of our social data solutions through our Market Intelligence acquisition earlier this year.”
Despite the sale of OneSource, an Infogroup spokesperson insisted in an emailed statement that the company has and will continue to be a provider of business information, pointing to tools such as “Data Axle,” developed from the GoTime platform, which is designed to link various hubs containing information about businesses and individuals. Tools like “Data Axle” were built to “further enable [the provision of business information], by offering [Infogroup] clients a more robust real-time view of B2B data,” the spokesperson said.
Infogroup initially acquired OneSource in June 2004 for $101 million in cash, back when the company was called infoUSA.
