Dow Jones and Company today announced its acquisition of Generate Inc., which enables business intelligence through a platform that combines real-time company intelligence with integrated relationship-mapping technology. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Generate's solution is geared toward executives to help them find opportunities with future business partners. Dow Jones plans to offer this solution to its financial services and business professional customers. According to a press release announcing the deal, the Generate acquisition further solidifies Dow Jones' "Power the Intelligent Enterprise" strategy, which calls for delivering information to a company's most information-intensive job function in the time and manner in which it is needed. Generate will be housed under a new Dow Jones business unit, Business & Relationship Intelligence, which is part of the company's Enterprise Media Group.

Generate's patented extraction and aggregation technology takes company and executive data from the Internet and maps relationships among those people and organizations. It crawls more than 75 million domains and extracts information on more than 4 million companies and 6.4 million executives. The technology also mines in real-time for more than 100 trigger events, such as mergers and acquisitions, which would be of interest to a business audience. The company intelligence is integrated with relationship-mapping technology that enables users to detect competitive moves, identify prospects and make the most of their corporate and personal networks.

This marks Dow Jones' second enterprise business-related acquisition of 2008. The first was its March purchase of Dutch language news service Betten Financial News BV.

This acquisition should serve to make Dow Jones an even more powerful information provider. Customers today demand solutions that efficiently provide the information they need as well as intelligence that will help make that data work even better for them. Plain data is never enough--technology that makes it actionable is a must.

Generate's technology is especially interesting, however. As executives become much more aware of the power of networking relationships (through the increased popularity of such social networking sites as LinkedIn), they will undoubtedly welcome the opportunity to utilize such technology that will help them increase the value of those relationships. More good news for customers is that Dow Jones seems very committed to the development of its Business & Relationship Intelligence unit. Expect the company to continue to acquire businesses that will fit under this umbrella and add additional value for Dow Jones' customers.