CMIE has built India's largest and most comprehensive database on firms operating in India. An extensive country-wide network to procure information, an efficient workflow design to ensure quick turnaround of information and a sophisticated methodology have worked in tandem to produce the most extensively used firm-level databases in the country.

CMIE monitors firms from their beginnings as investment projects through their growth into fully functioning companies and then their possible exit through mergers, acquisitions or distress. CMIE pioneered the monitoring of investments into new plant and machinery and the results of this effort is available through the Capex database. Capex has become the lead indicator of investment cycles in India.

Prowess is a database of the larger and listed Indian companies. It provides a great deal of detail on the performance of individual companies. The software provides powerful tools to harness the database into real-life applications. First Source is a much larger database (comprising over two hundred thousand companies). The information available per company is limited compared to Prowess but, it does provide a measure of the financial performance of the companies based on their Annual Reports.

The firm-level monitoring also includes capital changes, movements in stock prices and the performance of mutual funds. CMIE's firm-level databases are used extensively in

• Policy making
• Regulation
• Credit assessment
• Investments
• In academia