I recently had the opportunity to chat on the phone with Suzanne DeBell, newly appointed by ProQuest as General Manager of Dialog, after it acquired the firm from Thomson Reuters earlier this month. The article was part of a series I’m writing in the Information Advisor on how the big three traditional online services–Dialog, Dow Jones (Factiva) and LexisNexis are adapting to the world of Web 2.0 and social media.

The full interview with Suzanne will be in the August issue of Information Advisor, and that piece will be longer, and focus on the key changes that ProQuest is thinking about making to Dialog for the short and long term: content, platform technologies, features, etc. The below excerpt of the interview is more on the nature of the acquisition itself.

I’d like to note that I was very impressed with Suzanne from my telephone interview–she was extremely knowledgeable, thoughtful, and I very much enjoyed our conversation–she made me feel confident that Dialog is in good hands!

Q. What’s the status of the acquisition? It’s a done deal, right?
A. Yes it is, as of Wednesday, July 1.

Q. Why did ProQuest acquire Dialog?
A. It fit into our vision and our company mission. As you know, ProQuest was recently acquired by Cambridge Information Group and, as part of our merging into the new firm, we went through a company-wide vision and mission process. We determined that our vision is to be central to research around the world. But we knew that, because so much research happens in the corporate world, we could not accomplish that unless we had a corporate presence. Also, one of the core values we articulate for our company is librarianship. We feel that librarians serve

an important role in society and the fact that Dialog was such an important tool to librarians was very important to us.

Dialog also fits in strategically. We are an aggregator and we understand aggregation. So Dialog fit as a core business model.

Finally, Dialog is a great brand, with a tremendous amount of content assets that have been acquired over time. And when your business is aggregation, that is a valuable thing.

Q. Will Dialog be a product line or a company? Some have worried that it will be rebranded and just absorbed into ProQuest.
A. No—and this is the great thing—Dialog has been set up as its own strategic business unit, meaning that it will have control over its functional areas, will have its own resources and will run as a standalone business. This way we can rebuild some of the functions that had been merged into Thomson, such as a sales force and marketing operation; in fact, this is already well underway. We definitely won’t be rebranding—it takes years for a company like Dialog to build up its brand and reputation, and we wouldn’t want to lose that.

Q. Is Dialog now part of a larger group within ProQuest?
A. No, it’s its own group. I will be based in Cary, NC. I report to Marty Kahn, the CEO of ProQuest, who is based in Ann Arbor. He reports to Andy Snyder, the President and Chairman of CIG, in New York.

Q. What else do you think is Dialog’s real value and strength for ProQuest?
A. Well, there is the breadth of its publisher relationships, and its international presence. Again, a key mission for us is to be a global company, and more and more of our revenue is coming from outside of North America. Dialog has a lot of customers in Europe, and of course there is its whole DataStar European legacy. Dialog also has news sources that are not North American, and that is something we don’t have much of in ProQuest.

The full interview will be published in the August issue of The Information Advisor