ARchitect User Forum 2018 was, by far, the biggest since we began organizing the forums. As we continue to enhance the basic ARchitect capabilities with newer products such as Analyst Portal, Event Management and Premium Content, we are seeing rising interest in ARchitect. The audience was a broad representation of tech companies, agencies, and partners.
Below is a short description, with full copy, of each presentation for download. Please feel free to give us a call if you have any questions about any of the presentations.
Rethinking AR Strategy – Time to Reset the Status Quo?
In his presentation, Carter challenged AR professionals to rethink their AR strategy. Specifically, he covered 1) AR’s Charter – Should “show me the money” still be AR’s raison d’être? 2) AR’s Gaps – Is AR spread too thin resulting in missed high-value influence activities? He introduced the “AR Opportunities Gap Analysis” framework. 3) AR’s Future – Is AR falling into the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it fallacy? He presented the “AR Matrix for the Future” framework. 4) AR’s role -Should AR be aggressive in contributing to the company’s messaging and even strategy?
Carter Lusher is a grizzled veteran of the analyst game: IT manager end-user client, Research Fellow at Gartner and Ovum, co-founder of analyst-of-the-analysts firm SageCircle, and AR professional. He tweets at @CarterLusher and can be found on LinkedIn at in/CarterLusher.
Using Competence, Collaboration, Courage, Curiosity, & Confirmation to Build an AR Team for the Future
Ricarda emphasized that lot of thoughts, tools and time are needed to build a functionally effective and flexible AR team, along with a lot of empathy, elaboration and experimentation to develop a set of values to organize around. Functionally, Oracle AR’s goal is to be a modern, socially-aware, metrics-driven team. Values-wise, Oracle AR’s objective is to be collaborative, courageous and curious. She presented insights from her experience in building Oracle’s high-performing AR team and how ARchitect has become an essential part of Oracle’s AR structure, strategy, execution, and an enabler of its cultural growth and maturity.
Ricarda Rodatus heads up Oracle’s Analyst Relations Team as Vice President for the past 4 years. She has extensive experience in technology marketing and communications, having built a track record of local and global team leadership in hardware, software, and solutions for NCR/AT&T, Fujitsu Siemens, Microsoft, and SAP in Germany and the US before joining Oracle. She tweets at @rodatusr and can be found on LinkedIn at in/ricardarodatus.
Building a Rock Solid AR Program Beyond Gartner
Rose talked about how building out an AR Program is a fun and challenging experience. Walking into this role with some relevant experience from Gartner provided a great starting point, but it was only part of the process. ARchitect provides a platform to research relevant analysts, read and track what they are saying, and even helps build deeper relationships by providing tools to help manage daily activities and high profile events!
Rose Batia is the Head of Analyst Relations at Nutanix. She has an extensive background working in and with F1000 companies globally. Sales is not exactly the traditional route to the AR role, but in her last sales role before transitioning to AR Head at Nutanix, Rose worked for Gartner, the industry giant which facilitated her foray into the AR World. Rose provided her insights on making this transition and setting up a global program at one of the fastest growing companies with a billion+ in revenue. Rose can be found on LinkedIn at in/roseberube/.
Internal Promotion of AR
Core objectives of an analyst relations program are externally focused on sales enablement and competitive assessments. However, the most common challenge faced by analyst relations is showcasing delivered AR program value internally. AR’s credibility and investment hang on punchy progress reports. Mamta presented insights from her experience in internal promotion of AR through various channels, in addition to progress reporting and how ARchitect has helped TCS in this journey.
Mamta Shah is a key member of TCS Corporate Analyst Relations team based in New York. She has over 14 years of experience in technology and software services marketing with a strong focus on sales enablement, influencer relations, field marketing, and marketing return on investment research. She has worked in two different continents with Satyam and TCS in India before moving to the US. She tweets at @mamta_shah and can be found on LinkedIn at in/shahmamta.
Samsung’s Analyst Portal – One Year Later
The Samsung Electronics America team launched their Analyst Relations Portal over a year ago. In this presentation, Arthur Bailey discussed the progress made thus far and lessons learned. The Portal was conceived as a solution for analysts to view Samsung’s announcements and content at any time and from any location. Receiving hundreds of inbound inquiries from analysts each month, Samsung launched the Portal to reach analysts at scale, without having to conduct dozens of briefings and calls for every new product launch or feature change. With the Portal, Samsung can control which analysts have access, decide which content is available to each analyst, and immediately email a notification to analysts once new content is added – instantly logging that interaction and delivering a consistent cadence of communication with its target analysts.
Arthur Bailey is the Public Relations and Analyst Relations Lead for Samsung Electronics America and previously worked in enterprise communications for such well-known brands as Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Microsoft. He may be found on LinkedIn at in/arthurbailey.
Peer Review Sites – What You Need to Know and Do
TB2B technology buyers turn to their peers – your customers – as a primary source of input in their buying decisions. Surveys have shown that customer reviews influence purchasing decisions more than Industry Analyst Reports. TrustRadius CEO presented what an AR professional should know about the growing trend of peer review sites and how to respond. Vinay also presented original research into B2B technology buyer influences, and shared how leading technology companies like Oracle, IBM, SAP and Cisco are adapting.
Vinay Bhagat is Founder and CEO of his second venture, TrustRadius, a customer voice platform which helps professionals research B2B technology products and services, and helps vendors accelerate demand and sales, and deliver stronger products. Vinay’s first venture, Convio, became the leading provider of SaaS solutions to the nonprofit sector. Convico raised billions of dollars online for charities, scaled to over $80m revenue, 450 employees, went public on Nasdaq in 2010 and were acquired for $325m in May 2012. He tweets at @vinaybhagat and can be found on LinkedIn at in/vinaybhagat.
Enhancing Events for Analyst Relations
Crystal Golightly, head of ARInsights client development, showed how ARchitect has enhanced event management features to include an interactive dashboard, one click agendas, and reports.
Crystal is the Director of Client Development at ARInsights. She tweets are @crysgolightly and can be found on LinkedIn at in/crystalgolightly.
Technology Update
Andy McLandrich and Shashank Kulkarni presented the features added to ARchitect in the past year and the technology roadmap going forward.
Shashank is the CEO at ARInsights. He can be found on LinkedIn at in/shashankkulkarni.
Andy is a Senior Developer at ARInsights. He can be found on LinkedIn at in/andymclandrich.
