D&B and FirstRain announced a partnership to deliver a ground-breaking solution combining structured and unstructured business data and analytics. The solution will provide a 360-degree view of a company that unifies relevant social content with D&B's leading commercial content in a simple and seamless manner that is easy to use and integrate into business applications, in near real time. Under a long-term strategic agreement, FirstRain provides D&B with customer and market intelligence, which D&B delivers through its world class solutions.

The agreement with Silicon Valley-based FirstRain, an emerging leader in big data analytics, builds on D&B's commitment to investing in and providing its customers with breakthrough and innovative services. Going far beyond traditional news feeds, FirstRain big data analytics on unstructured information, including social media conversations on Twitter and blogs, deliver highly relevant, real-time insights on companies, markets and competitors to sales and marketing teams. FirstRain users have a superior understanding of their customer's businesses, uncovering greater opportunities and risks, and ultimately driving smarter business decisions and accelerating growth. D&B users now have access to FirstRain's first-level analytics integrated directly within the D&B solutions including Hoovers, D&B360, D&B Direct and First Research(R).

The combination of D&B data and insight on more than 230 million businesses, 100 million business executives and three million corporate family trees linked via the D&B DUNS(R) Number with FirstRain's real- time insights on customers and markets sets the standard for business data analytics.