Dun & Bradstreet Cloud Innovation Center an Anchor of Vancouver’s Downtown Tech Community

The Dun & Bradstreet Cloud Innovation Center has opened its new space in downtown Vancouver, a fitting expression of its new role within Dun & Bradstreet, and in alignment with its intention to engage the Vancouver tech community as a whole.

After a rapid expansion of the team, having grown over 300% in a year with more yet to come, and a new mission within the 174-year-old company, the Cloud Innovation Center moved from Vancouver’s financial district to Robson Street, in the middle of a growing downtown tech area. 

The office is two floors, designed thematically to match the musical heritage of the Granville Street Entertainment District. The open office features murals, numerous comfortable and private meeting areas, hickory panelling, and a wrap-around outdoor space. The office was designed not only to house the Dun & Bradstreet team, but to be an open social space to host tech events and meetups.

Dun & Bradstreet, the world’s leading source of commercial information and insight on businesses, considers itself a tech company, and the Cloud Innovation Center is meant to bolster Dun & Bradstreet’s place as a technology thought leader and innovator in its domain, leveraging the massive data they collect on 230 million businesses globally to do credit intelligence.

Mark Cunningham, President and Founder of the Dun & Bradstreet Cloud Innovation Center said, “What the Innovation Center is about is harnessing that data and then taking it to the next level of what do we do:  how do we create insights for organizations, how to we create meaning from that data, how do we help companies make decisions with that data that Dun & Bradstreet collects and provides for its customers. What our team and our platform is doing is building out a software strategy for Dun & Bradstreet that is modern and forward thinking”

The Cloud Innovation Center is the result of last year’s acquisition of Indicee by Dun & Bradstreet. Indicee, which was founded by Mark Cunningham, provided a cloud business intelligence platform, and was acquired to innovate new, cloud-based processes to deliver Dun & Bradstreet’s proprietary data and analytics.

The role of the Innovation Center is to create products that allow users to access and derive insight from the incredible amount of data Dun & Bradstreet has. Cunningham said, “We’re not a think tank. We’re not just a research lab.  We are an innovation lab trying to do a next generation of software for the organization, but we are about shipping software.  We’re about building it, and actually putting it in the hands of customers. We are a product innovation team”

The team is revamping Dun & Bradstreet’s flagship product, DNBi, a credit intelligence solution that helps credit managers inside medium- and large-enterprises determine whether an organization is worthy of extending credit to.

Previously, Dun & Bradstreet provided solutions differing by region. Now the intention is to globalize the data, platform, and user experience so users can access data on a global database and be more flexible with the data, simplifying and streamlining the mashup process.

The Cloud Innovation Center is intended not only to be an anchor within Dun & Bradstreet, but within the Downtown Vancouver tech community as well.

Cunningham said, “We’re doing thought leadership pieces on cloud technologies, cloud innovation, and data.  We have a technology speaker series we’re putting together. We have Adrian Cockcroft from Netflix coming up here in about a month.  One of the things we want to do in this office space is have community engagement here. We want to start seeing the community come in and utilize the space for user group meetings, open source meetings, and different types of things.”

The Dun & Bradstreet talk with Adrian Cockcroft on the Future of Cloud Innovation will take place on July 9.