Mr Cookson commented that DCI has been helpful in identifying contract opportunities and market intelligence relevant to NATS:

John Cookson, Defence Business Advisor at NATS

"As a provider of specialist skills and services, DCI is my daily source for identifying key opportunities. DCI is also an excellent source for keeping me up to date with what is happening within the defence sector, and the Market Monitor announcements we receive are particularly interesting and helpful."

Mr Cookson highlighted the benefits to NATS of the valuable and wide-ranging information provided by DCI:

"Although we are a specialist provider in a safety-critical industry, it is not always recognised that we have a defense interest. By using DCI to keep abreast of what is happening in the defense world I can be proactive."

When asked to comment on the account management support that he has received as part of his DCI service, Mr Cookson stated:

"My DCI account manager, Frances Goldie, is excellent; very proactive and, on the few occasions that I have used the DCI Helpdesk, the service has been first class. "

Mr Belfield commented that DCI had been successful in identifying the contract opportunities that are relevant to his business, saying:

"If I wasn't using DCI, I would find it difficult to source the relevant contract opportunities from the increasingly wide geographical and defense sector searches that are relevant to Ceradyne. As the company continues to research and move into new countries such as Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, DCI will continue to be a valuable tool.

DCI allows me to narrow down my searches, providing me with important information on tender requests in my selected area of Europe.The DCI search service allows me to enter keywords and codes relating to my particular area of business so that I only receive relevant contract information."

When asked to comment on the level of support that he has gained from his DCI Account Manager, Bryan Marshall, Mr Belfield said:

"Bryan has been very helpful in responding to any of my service queries extremely quickly and dealing with any issues to my satisfaction."

Mr James commented that DCI had been successful in highlighting contract opportunities and market intelligence relevant to his business, saying:

"I use DCI primarily as an alert service for opportunities which we are aware are in the pipeline but also for highlighting targets of opportunity that occasionally elude our intelligence gathering.We are a relatively small company with limited resources; it is impossible to track every possible lead personally so a service such as DCI can be very useful for an initial indication that an organisation less familiar to us has needs similar to those we satisfy for our current customers."

When asked to comment on the recently enhanced DCI website and Daily Email Alert service,Mr James stated:

"The ease with which I receive and can scan daily alerts is very attractive when I am busy. It's most useful to know about the early phases of a task or project, when we need to know a potential customer is ready to receive expressions of our interest in bidding. This is especially true for those targets of opportunity that sometimes crop up, apparently out of the blue. The DCI service is also useful for confirmation of other milestones, such as issue of invitations to tender, and for double checking information such as anticipated budgets, timescales and the identities of competitors. The new site looks a lot cleaner and clearer and is therefore simpler to use.

My DCI gives you the ability to alter keyword lists online without affecting the saved profile in order to conduct a search in real-time for a more focused list of opportunities,which is a useful additional feature."

Mr James highlighted the benefits to BMT Defence Services of the valuable and wide-ranging information provided by DCI:

"DCI makes it much easier for me to track possible future purchases by our customers, both in the UK and abroad. I can use it to confirm and fix more precisely intelligence from our BDMs and others about opportunities and their timescales, sizes, nature, contracting parties and competitors.

We've started doing more business both with other national authorities elsewhere in Europe and with the supranational bodies such as the European Defence Agency, so we expect to make more use of the multinational alert features within DCI.

Philip James,Marketing Manager
at BMT Defence Services Ltd

The 'I' in 'DCI' is increasingly important to us, as it provides us with both marketing and business development intelligence about geographical markets other than the United Kingdom and our main customers, the UK Ministry of Defence and its Prime Contractors. We recognised some time ago the limited number of major programme opportunities that we could address in future if we restricted ourselves to the UK market alone and we have made significant and sustained efforts to broaden our geographical customer base, with a good deal of success. We can address that partly through working with our colleagues in our parent company's network of subsidiaries abroad and partly through direct approaches to the defense agencies in friendly countries.

So the ability to customise the search filters to focus on opportunities in a defined list of countries is very useful. It would be pointless to spend time examining alerts about countries whose lack of a navy, or even a coastline, or geopolitical realities would rule them out as potential customers and it's easy to filter those out when creating a DCI alert profile."