• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, January 25, 2012

Data.com, a Salesforce.com company, will expand into Europe supported by an agreement announced Wednesday to make Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) data available to customers, Tricia Gellman, senior director of product marketing at Data.com, told MediaPost.

Gellman said the company will need to build out its technology, tools and user interface to support added data it will get from D&B. "You need an interface easy to use with drop-down menus," she said. "We'll support the U.K. market first, because we already have some data and customers there."

Today, Data.com has about 4 million accounts that will have access to the D&B data. To expand internationally, the company will need to bring the "entire D&B asset online, and by doing that we can expand outside North America," Gellman said.

Countries where Salesforce.com already has customers, such as France, Germany and the Netherlands, will follow the rollout in the United Kingdom. Data.com can support international companies wanting to do business with others in United States, but today the Salesforce.com cannot support U.S. companies  looking for data elsewhere in the world.

The plan is to create a "democratized platform" similar to Salesforce.com. It gives companies, from small to large, the opportunity to use the tools because it's provided in a multitenant business model, where companies only pay for what they need, Gellman said.

As a data provider, Data.com's goal becomes simplifying the process, she said. The D&B data can help marketing teams determine the best territories for ad sales. 

Data.com's contract with D&B comes from Salesforce's acquisition of Jigsaw.com in May 2010 for $142 million. Jigsaw.com Founder Jim Fowler describes the company as a Wikepedia for business directories, where the information gets crowdsourced in an open platform.