Great tool for Sourcing Teams
January 17, 2018

Great tool for Sourcing Teams

Kevin Cannon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Oracle DataFox

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Sales

DataFox is solely being used by the M&A Sourcing team. It greatly helps in the mining effort for unearthing worthwhile companies by keywords and provides details on companies that are generally better than other tools (Owler, Hoover's, etc).
  • Companies that fit a keyword. This is really valuable for M&A teams trying to flush out all companies related to a key phrase/market name. It will also give insight into other keywords that provide insight for how it compares to similar companies of that name.
  • Probably one of its biggest claims to fame is that it is 'best in show' for providing $$$ figures of acquisitions. Many of these go unreported but DataFox, generally, will have this information. We have been able to verify this before with insight into prior acquisitions.
  • Great User Interface - it is so easy & intuitive & new for a user to move around with, business user oriented, little time required to reach value.
  • Export capability, particularly around a list companies for key phrases/specialties, is really easy to use.
  • There is a significant price barrier with this product for many businesses and proving the use case/value will be a substantial difficulty for smaller departments. I do not know the exact figure nor was I the decision maker, but I was told the smallest deployment was around $10K/year.
  • Improved/integrating more analytic features is possible & would greatly add value to many use cases.
  • It provides a lot of high-level information on the vendor, but can expand this with RSS for news updates, better job enabling a comparison to similar competitive products, etc. It might seem like a 'well, duh' in much of the information but little things highlighting discrepancies in comparison to similar companies & where executives came from prior to their role (in a lot of these situations, they likely have the info stored but not the bandwidth/processes for that to be applied when moved to a new company).
  • I don't have hard ROI numbers for it, but say the use case was using DataFox vs. googling everything yourself: I estimate that the average user would need to spend 1-2 hours assembling data points from: LinkedIn, company webpage/investor relations, press releases, etc & would likely only come up with 50-75% of the content available on DataFox that could have been on your page immediately in searching the company name.
  • Take my example from above and keeping in mind the related keywords/specialties point I mentioned earlier (DataFox highlighting similar companies). I've been on projects where we: took a company/keywords we liked --> exported from DataFox 15-20+ columns of information on 400+ companies that we could then filter down manually or use filter options based on results that DataFox gave us. This process without DataFox is heartbreaking to think of - what me & a team of 4 others did in a week (~200 hours) to reach a clean C-level caliber report would have taken someone without DataFox easily 500+ hours & there is no telling that this individual would have been able to find all the companies that DataFox led us to.
  • Best ROI is analyst time spend
  • Hoover's
Apologies - there are a few others that are not coming to the top of my head aside Hoover's but I have experience with 4-5 similar tools. What makes DataFox stand out is its ability to group companies by keyword and insight into transactions.
SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, Tableau Desktop
It's a really great tool and just about anyone who has worked in market research for a considerable amount of time would agree with that. It immediately provides foundational background information on a company with insights that enable users to see beyond just the company to the broader landscape that it is a part of. Best Scenario - Large companies with large budgets that need to know what companies can add value/hurt them now. Worst Scenario - Smaller companies using it as a reference tool with essentially no use case aside quick hits on individual companies.

DataFox (discontinued) Feature Ratings