EBSCO nears $2B in annual sales offering 'Google-like experience' of scholarly works - Boston Business Journal

Three decades ago, when he was in his early 20s, Tim Collins and his stepfather launched a company based on the idea that some day, people would want to search for credible, scholarly information electronically.
The result about 30 years later is Ipswich, Mass.-based EBSCO Information Services — a company with 2,900 employees that's expecting revenue of nearly $2 billion in its current fiscal year (which ends July 2014).

EBSCO Information Services, known as EBSCO, offers academic databases for colleges and universities, medical databases for the health care industry, publications for corporations, and databases and journals for government institutions.
Topsfield resident Collins, who has been president since the company's inception, attributes EBSCO’s success to the advancement of technology.
“It’s the information age and we’re selling information products,” said Collins, 49. “These institutions want to purchase and access more of their content electronically, so we’ve benefited from the transition from print to digital.”
Students, doctors and librarians all over the world are mining EBSCO’s more than 375 research databases for information.
“It’s kind of like the Google search engine,” he said. “That’s a key component of what we do, is getting all this content and being able to deliver the appropriate results.”
More than 100,000 institutions pay for subscriptions to EBSCO’s online databases, and more than 40 percent of the company’s business comes from outside the U.S. and Canada. Customers in Australia, New Zealand and Asia are among the fastest growing users, Collins said.
Annual database subscriptions range from $5,000 to $50,000. The company has grown sales every year since 1983 despite economic downturns, because credible electronic information is in high demand, Collins said.
“Users want to be able to have a Google-like experience, but get high-quality, vetted, peer-reviewed content,” he said.
Education & health care customers
Post-secondary education institutions account for EBSCO’s largest market share, and the fastest growing customers are “medical point of care” users. That means doctors and nurses at health care facilities that use EBSCO to search for concise summaries of information published in medical journals and periodicals around the world.
“We have a large team of doctors and medical writers that digest this information and provide concise summaries of what’s being written,” he said.
In the early 1980s, when Collins was still a student at the University of New Hampshire, he launched a company with his stepfather called Popular Magazine Review, that summarized magazine articles. “When we started the business, we really didn’t see what the future could bring,” he said. “But once I got out of college and worked full time as president, I could see the potential for going from print to CD-ROM.”
But Collins didn’t have the funding to capitalize on that opportunity. So he sold the company in 1987, when it had about 10 employees, to Alabama-based EBSCO Industries. Today, the company is the largest division of EBSCO Industries.
EBSCO Information Services started growing its online research databases in the 1990s. Since then, EBSCO has made more than 60 acquisitions, including acquiring H.W. Wilson Company, Business Book Summaries, and databases such as CINAHL, the Cumulative Index of Nursing and Health Literature.
In July, EBSCO's online subscription services division merged with EBSCO Industries' publishing division under the name EBSCO Information Services. The company's headquarters remain in Ipswich but the merger resulted in an additional 1,400 employees in offices in more than 30 countries, bringing the total number of employees at EBSCO Information Services to 2,900.
The private company’s revenue has increased by at least 9 percent every year since it was founded, Collins said. The company is on track to post about $1.8 billion in revenues for the fiscal year ending at the close of next July, with the online research service business in Ipswich growing by about $50 million over the previous fiscal year.
In the future, EBSCO hopes to expand its e-book platform, which currently has more than 420,000 e-books. The company also anticipates more subscribers to its Discovery Service product line, which allows library users to search all electronic content available using only one search box instead of searching for information through multiple interfaces. “It’s a fast-growing product,” Collins said.


EBSCO nears $2B in annual sales offering 'Google-like experience' of scholarly works - Boston Business Journal