Northern Light Launches Target CI, a Research Portal for Competitive Intelligence Professionals

Portal offers integrated search and analysis of business news and social media content for CI applications; demonstration available tomorrow on free webinar

News provided by

Northern Light

Oct 07, 2014, 08:35 ET

BOSTON, Oct. 7, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Northern Light® (www.northernlight.com) today launched Target CI™, a research portal optimized for competitive intelligence (CI) professionals that offers integrated search of thousands of business news sources and social media feeds critical to CI research and analysis, and the ability to synthesize and share it with a CI group's internal clients.

Target CI is designed for competitive intelligence professionals who are under constant demand for information that is current, compelling, and useful. The solution combines Northern Light Business News™ and social media monitoring with Northern Light's business-driven search engine, advanced text analytics, and collaboration in a solution priced for competitive intelligence departments.

Northern Light will demonstrate Target CI during a free webinar tomorrow (Wed., Oct. 8) at 11:00 a.m. ET. (Click here to register for the webinar.)

"Target CI is a competitive intelligence solution optimized for small teams with big mandates," C. David Seuss, Northern Light's CEO, said. "Our goal is to make it easy and affordable for organizations to get and distribute competitive intelligence and market analysis, so it can be put to best strategic use."

Target CI contains Northern Light Business News, which aggregates 40,000 news articles per day from 5,700 business-focused sources, including newswires and industry authority blogs, for up-to-date information related to:

Competitors' announcements, partnerships, and products
M & A activity that signals competitors' strategic intentions
Venture-funded companies that represent competitors' potential acquisition shopping list
New technology and disruptive events
Emerging markets and business trends
Industry authorities' commentary about a company, its market and competitors

Twitter feeds on relevant companies and topics will be added to each Target CI portal based on the client's needs.

In addition, CI professionals can automate alerts on topics of interest, and do one click analysis and drill downs on strategic topics surfaced by Northern Light's analytics engine, MI Analyst™, which automatically analyzes documents found in search results. MI Analyst can analyze documents using industry-specific concepts and concept categories as well as general business facets such as Company Names, Corporate Strategies, and Product Marketing Strategies.

Distribution options offered in the portal include newsletters and RSS feeds. Using the newsletter tool, CI analysts can create newsletters with automated search alerts populating fields in the newsletters, and they can add their own editorial and commentary. In addition, any search can be saved as an alert, which creates a vertical topic feed that can then be distributed using RSS to any enterprise intranet site.

Target CI is available for immediate subscription for CI departments; enterprise-level licensing is also an option. Access is licensed on an annual subscription basis.

For organizations that need additional content sets and customization, Northern Light offers SinglePoint™ Strategic Research Portals. SinglePoint can be tailored to the look and feel of the client organization; can integrate diverse sources of internal, external, and licensed market intelligence; and can selectively populate or extract information from Microsoft SharePoint sites or other enterprise content repositories.

About Northern Light
Northern Light has been providing strategic research portals, business research content, and search technology to global enterprises since 1996. Northern Light's current clients include Fortune 100 leaders across multiple industries such as information technology, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, and life sciences. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, Northern Light has unique content aggregation partnerships with more than 150 of the world's leading syndicated technology and industry research publishers, and, along with Lockheed Martin, is a charter member of the Center for Complex Systems and Enterprises at the Stevens Institute of Technology.

NOTE: Northern Light will demonstrate Target CI during a free webinar tomorrow (Wed., Oct. 8) at 11:00 a.m. ET; register here.