Arguably Ireland's leading provider of information services, Rochford Brady Group has been in the business of providing information to business professionals for more than two decades. The country's largest online and offline search provider, it has evolved its information services from statutory documents to function-driven information products.

Rochford Brady Group is the leading company operating in Ireland which offers access to on-line information as well as clerical information. It currently employs about 75 staff, made up mostly of research professionals and law clerks, with about 20 working on-line and the remainder working on paperbased information.

Within the rbonline Group are a number of information services targeted at various sectors in the commercial/professional world. These include Lawlink (a legal information website), and Company Information Direct (CID), which supplies information on every limited company, every registered business name, every director and all scanned documents in Ireland.

"We have enjoyed a technical and commercial relationship with the Companies Registration Office (CRO) for the past 10 years or so, " said chief operations officer Barry Darmody. "Our four main client groups include lawyers, accountants, financial service providers and company secretary firms. Overall, within the information market, we have about 30%, which includes practically every household name as our clients . . . we deal with all of the top five clearing banks, all of the top four accountancy firms, and all of the top 20 legal firms."

As a business to business tool, much of the success of CID can be traced to the fact that it offers a quality driver, professional service.

"We place great importance on the integrity of the information that we provide, and so we go to great lengths to ensure that all of our information is of the highest quality, " said Darmody. "But we are also market leaders in innovation, developing our own technologies to find new ways of analysing data so that it is not only comprehensive but also well presented."

A measure of the innovative nature of rbonline is the fact that it has been supplying on-line company information since 1996 . . . which is a number of years before the CRO began its on-line service.

However, there are other companies working within the information service market, and the newest of these is Data Ireland. This new data management company came into being following a merger between Kompass Ireland and Precision Marketing Information (PMI), two organisations which are among Ireland's leading business and consumer data suppliers respectively.

Kompass has operated in Ireland for 20 years, supplying mainly sales and marketing information to businesses across all sectors. All information is gathered and updated directly from each company on a regular basis, and Kompass holds a database of over 120,000 businesses with 130,000 business contacts and represents another 1.9 million businesses worldwide.

Kompass publishes data in four formats: print, CD, Internet and email (for its direct mail service). As Kompass is a publishing company, it is subjected to public scrutiny more than any other business data supplier. Therefore, Kompass data must be of the highest quality at all times.

Indeed, many Irish exporters purchase Kompass' UK and European CDs as their main source of overseas companies and contact information.

Kompass data is also available on subscription over the internet.

Data Ireland, through PMI specialise in consumer lists and lifestyle data. As a result Data Ireland is a one stop shop for business and consumer lists for companies. It also offers database cleansing, data capture and data scanning as a service, and a comprehensive suite of Data Management tools built on the most up to date data available in addition to campaign management and analysis.