(FORTUNE Magazine) – How could investors fail to notice a company that once employed Abraham Lincoln--once owned such classic names as A.C. Nielsen, Thomas Cook, and R.H. Donnelley--and is now growing earnings at better than 10% a year, using excess cash to buy back stock, paying a dividend, yet selling at less than a market multiple?

The answer: It's easy to ignore if it's a credit-rating specialist named Dun & Bradstreet. "The company has restructured so often," says Wasserstein Perella's Ed Atorino, "it's lost its identity and some Wall Street sponsorship." Another analyst is more blunt: "Most people see D&B as a stodgy old company that has traditionally overpromised and underdelivered."

Now D&B is restructuring yet again--but this time investors have reason to be optimistic. Terry Taylor, who was named CEO in late 1996, says he is determined to turn the $2 billion company into a "slimmed-down, more tightly focused" operation. Already, he's dumped Donnelley and repackaged D&B's basic product--its database on more than 50 million companies throughout the world, private as well as public, updated 950,000 times a day--into a tool to help businesses coordinate their purchasing, marketing, and sales. To make the information even more useful, D&B on Feb. 8 was due to announce a partnership with SAP, the big business-to-business software company, to embed its data in the company's applications. Further ahead, Taylor's goal is to make his company the critical intermediary in e-commerce.

Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Fine has made D&B one of her year-end stock picks. "It's got two of the best franchises that exist," she says, "and they're now being run by people who know how to make things happen." Most analysts expect the company to report earnings of $1.57 a share for 1998, up 12% from 1997, and to show a further 11% to 12% increase this year.

One franchise--accounting for 25% of D&B's revenues --is Moody's Investors Service. Along with Standard & Poor's, Moody's has a virtual lock on the low-overhead, high-demand credit-rating business, and its revenues have increased every year but one since 1980. With global trends like deregulation and securitization plus the euro driving demand for ratings, management expects Moody's revenues to grow at least 10% a year.

More dramatic developments are afoot on the information-services side, which accounted for $1.4 billion in revenue last year. Traditionally D&B has collected data on the bill-paying history of the companies in its database, giving each a nine-digit "DUNS number." Clients used the data to decide whether to do business with a company.

Now Andre Dahan, who became president of D&B's U.S. operations in July 1997, hopes to expand that repertoire, to persuade clients to use the data for marketing, purchasing, and even, as he puts it, "to 'dry-clean' their files." By tracking DUNS numbers a parent company might find that several of its subsidiaries had overlapping customer or vendor lists. This portion of the business brought in only $180 million in 1998 but is growing 50% annually. And deals like the software arrangement with SAP could "expand D&B's audience by hundreds of thousands of users," predicts Clare Gillan, vice president of infotech market researcher International Data Corp.

The next step: e-commerce, which urgently needs secure, reliable, third-party information. A D&B lab in Silicon Alley is working on an electronic ID, employing D&B data, that could be used to authenticate parties doing business on the Web.

It's D&B's good fortune that its basic stock in trade--information--is a vital commodity in the Information Age. As long as it keeps up with the times, it can be the kind of company that merits a top rating from D&B.

--Lawrence A. Armour