Dun & Bradstreet: Better decisions through data

This ampersand has a story all its own.

Nestled in the heart of the company’s name for nearly 150 years, the “and” symbol graphically represents the historic merging of business visions inspired by two 19th century financiers, Robert Graham Dun and John M. Bradstreet. Look closely at the logo: a lowercase “d” presses into the back of an uppercase “B.”

Dun & Bradstreet logo Today, that ampersand also embodies Dun & Bradstreet’s commitment to use data and analytics to guide its customers in building smart relationships.

“We help companies better understand all of their business relationships – whether that be with prospects, customers, suppliers or partners – so that they can make the best business decisions to help them ultimately grow their organizations,” says Mike Sabin, Dun & Bradstreet’s executive vice president and general manager of global business solutions.

Each day, Dun & Bradstreet receives 5 million database updates from more than 30,000 global data sources, resulting in the world’s largest commercial database, which can be used to improve business processes and make profitable decisions.

Based in northern New Jersey, Dun & Bradstreet is now ingesting and transforming all of that data in new ways, including via machine learning algorithms that run analyses to unlock truth and insights hidden in the raw numbers, says Curtis Brown, Dun & Bradstreet’s chief content and technology officer.

The company chose Microsoft as a strategic cloud provider to offer its customers more efficient and seamless access to its commercial data. Dun & Bradstreet is building new services on Microsoft Azure and using Microsoft intelligent cloud services to modernize its applications.

“By moving more to the cloud, by leveraging more digital capabilities and understanding those digital interactions,” Sabin says, “we extract incredible amounts of intelligence that ultimately help us better serve our customers so that they can make better decisions.”