Weighing In on the Catalog Co-op Databases '06

"We continually make significant investment in not only our products, but the infrastructure and the technologies that support it," Carey says. "We spend a significant share of our R&D dollars just getting better at what we already have."

And one product that's come out of those R&D efforts is FastPath, a prospecting solution that relies heavily on Abacus' ability to leverage the large number of names in its database. The FastPath service asks a cataloger to take 100 percent of its circulation from the Alliance database. This is predicated on the notion that other co-ops and rental lists provide a subset of the names that Abacus can provide, Carey says.