Dear DACIS Subscriber,
In the world of government databases, there is no database so ripe with useful competitive intelligence as the Federal Procurement Data System.
It's a truly massive database, containing every contract awarded by the U.S. federal government—and every significant action on those contracts.
FPDS is publicly available. Many of our brethren in the government publishing space have downloaded it and spun out applications from it. Eagle Eye Publishers in its heyday made a living from it. Others have used it to supplement their core applications.
So we're late to the party. But we're excited to be there just the same, because we see ourselves as occupying a unique position: for InfoBase, FPDS can both supplement our core proprietary databases and be an application in its own right.
Today we are announcing the first contribution to DACIS from FPDS. Effective today you can search our Contracts module and find any contract appearing in FPDS. FPDS data has also been associated with every contract number appearing in our Contracts and Programs modules. Click on a contract number and you'll see obligations totaled by fiscal year, elegantly integrated with the detailed analysis for which InfoBase is known.
You can effortlessly drill down from this high-level view to look at individual actions. And there's more: we also provide a navigation that allows you to split out task orders, and to isolate the contracts which are being funded through the GSA Schedule.
This functionality is being provided to you at no charge, because our philosophy is to make DACIS an ever-more-valuable proposition while holding the line on its cost to you. Other FPDS-based applications are in preparation which we think you'll also like, and will be delighted to pay for.
But first we'll be doing even more to integrate FPDS with our core DACIS application. I'm looking forward to the next announcement... watch this space.
Best regards,

Stuart McCutchan
President
InfoBase Publishers, Inc.
Jan. 13, 2011