U.S. directory and local search player The Berry Co. has scooped up defunct search marketing firm WebVisible’s Geneva platform from a liquidator in the wake of that company’s collapse.

“This acquisition will dramatically enhance our presence and capabilities in the digital local search space,” said John Fischer, interim president and CEO of TBC Holdings and Berry. “We plan to take the best of the Geneva technology and create a new platform and leads optimization engine that meets the ever-changing needs of advertisers across a range of digital products. We are delighted with the exceptional range of software development and product management talent represented by the employees of the new company.”

Berry has set up a separate business, based in Playa Vista, California, to operate the platform. One of the main reasons for the arm’s-length relationship is that the WebVisible business was based on reseller relationships, some of which Berry will maintain, while longer term Berry has ambitions to develop the technology further and possibly seek additional customers for the platform. This would be difficult if the operation were nested within the Berry organization. Essentially, Berry will become a customer of the new entity.

In addition to the technology, Berry has taken on 14 engineers and a few product specialists to help operate the platform.

Eric Owen, Berry’s VP of digital strategy and partnerships, told BIA/Kelsey that the WebVisible platform had several attributes that Berry found compelling, among them its dashboard capability, call tracking network and an order entry and ad insertion system with billing functionality. That latter is critical to helping Berry provision more digital products.

And moving more digital products through the pipeline is key to Berry’s longer term strategy, which involves provisioning multiple lead generating products and tracking the performance for the customer.

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Last week, Local Insight Media emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy, roughly one year after seeking protection from its creditors.

The company emerges from bankruptcy with a new structure, a new board of directors and a more manageable balance sheet, having eliminated 90 percent of its debt. The company is also adopting a familiar new name — The Berry Co. LLC. The name Local Insight Media will be phased out over time, according to the company.

Last year’s bankruptcy filing was soon followed by a management shakeup, in which CEO Scott Pomeroy and other senior executives left the company. Pomeroy was replaced on an interim basis by Scott Brubaker, an executive with the turnaround firm Alvarez and Marsal. The company recently named John Fischer as its permanent CEO.

Berry is not alone. Other companies in the directory industry have recently passed through bankruptcy, including SuperMedia, Dex One and Truvo.

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The deals fit into Berry’s broader strategy of becoming less print centric and more about selling a wide array of local media solutions, supported by performance measurement. To achieve this, Berry is collecting a growing list of partners to deliver components of this strategy, Yodle and Web.com being the latest two. Berry already resells Yellowpages.com and Google, and it has formed a deep partnership with 3L Systems and Salesforce.com to create the systems to enable the company to sell and provision media across multiple products and platforms.

“Our goal is to ensure that our small and medium-sized business clients are generating local leads from the multiple sources and platforms that today’s consumers use,” said Scott Pomeroy, president and CEO of Berry, in the announcement today. “We believe that Web.com and Yodle will bring best-in-class products, fulfillment and digital expertise to our clients, complementing our client-focused approach.”

A year ago, we talked with Yodle after it raised a US$10 million round. At that time, the company reported 5,000 advertisers and 250 employees. Yodle, like rival ReachLocal (which recently filed for an IPO), deploys a direct sales force.

As we learned recently, SuperMedia CEO Scott Klein is open to the idea of companies like ReachLocal reselling its inventory. The Berry-Yodle deal has Berry reselling Yodle’s products. However, we wonder if the Berry-Yodle deal couldn’t be a two-way street, given Yodle’s direct contact with SMBs?

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As a result, the company is slimming down, closing offices in Hudson and Cincinnati, Ohio, and Pennsylvania and consolidating operations in North Carolina. It is also moving some 90 production positions to the Dominican Republic. Denver will remain the company’s corporate headquarters, while the Dayton, Ohio, office will see substantial change as jobs are cut in some areas and added in others.

All in all, the restructuring will affect about 320 jobs, according to the company. The Dayton Business Journal is reporting that 140 jobs will be eliminated in Dayton, with 50 new jobs in Internet sales created there later this year.

All this is designed to set up the company for a shift from its traditional print-focused sales model to one focused on selling a wide array of traditional and digital media products. Berry outlined this new strategy on its third-quarter earnings call in November.

On that call, Berry CEO Scott Pomeroy summed up the new approach this way, “Our plan is to deploy a flexible, scalable approach in offering our multiplatform solution set to meet a range of advertiser requirements.” At the heart of this is a commitment to “fully trackable results.”

To enable this transition, Berry spent much of 2009 converting about 150 different publishing systems and applications onto a single platform from 3L Systems Group. That conversion is expected to kick in early this year.

Pomeroy also said part of the company’s plan for 2010 would be to “optimize costs” and focus on keeping or building on its sales and marketing core, while cutting costs elsewhere in the organization. Last week’s announcement seems to be the fulfillment of that promise.

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