Neustar acquires TargusInfo, blending customer, network data

If the future of the telecom business is in leveraging data, Neustar just made a big play, adding loads of customer and demographic data capabilities to its existing network address and routing info.

To consolidate that position, Neustar –known to carriers for helping to route IP traffic, text messages and phone calls via its IP and numbering databases and services – acquired fellow information services and analytics provider TargusInfo Wednesday for $650 million. TargusInfo has strengths in caller ID and online data/information services (including things such as lead scoring), processing more than 100 billion transactions per year.

In announcing the deal, Neustar president and CEO Lisa Hook noted that “there’s an overwhelming logic to our combination.”

The combined companies will bring together their databases and tools to deliver real-time information and analytics to telecom service providers (as well as other tech companies, like media and marketing players). Among their areas of focus:

- managing global telephone and IP address dtabases for service providers

- providing domain name system (DNS), geolocation and Web site performance monitoring solutions

- and the important if more fuzzy goal of playing “neutral coordinator” among network, content and application providers in an increasingly cloud-based world

Carriers are looking for solutions that not only help them leverage their massive amounts of internal data – including customer and calling records – but combine those in intelligent ways with third-party data, all with a goal of improving customer experience and maximizing subscriber ARPU.