Regular readers know that this site is published by Ardent Partners, a leading research and advisory firm focused on supply management. With the New Year just around the corner, we wanted to share some of the exciting plans that we have in store for you in 2013. Last week, we shared our 2013 plans for CPO Rising; today, we will discuss our plans for Ardent Partners.
Ardent Partners
As a reminder, Ardent Partners is a traditional analyst firm that operates in an nontraditional (or progressive) way. We are laser-focused on supply management and the processes, strategies, and technologies that underlie this area and our two constituencies are (1) practitioner groups focused on supply management and (2) the solution providers who operate in this space. We count customers in both groups and believe we have found a healthy balance in the amount of work and revenue coming from these constituencies and in the research that is targeted to each.
Our work with practitioners tends to focus on technology selection, custom benchmarking, and small strategy projects and has been almost entirely in-bound. We are not out pursing consulting clients but we will consider supporting a CPO or procurement team (or AP team) if (1) the need falls within our areas of expertise and within our schedule and (2) it is something that will take longer to resolve than an initial inquiry/call [Sidebar: We respond to many, many inquiries from our readers and try to assist them (at no charge) and/or refer them to some group that can. I encourage all of you to reach out with your questions and issues]. While we enjoy working on consulting projects, we will absolutely remain an analyst firm first, and foremost, and have no plans to develop a large consulting practice.
Ardent Partners’ Plan for 2013: Staff Expansion
As we enter our fourth year, we expect to continue our fast growth and have plans to expand our research team and add some infrastructure support as well.
In Q1, we expect to add our third full-time senior analyst who will bolster our current coverage, that currently cuts across strategic sourcing, procurement, and AP, and lead our coverage of a new area within supply management. The addition of this senior analyst will mean that Ardent’s “Supply Management” research practice will be as large as (and, in some cases, larger than) any of the other traditional analyst firms working in the space – but wait, there’s more….. This new analyst will soon be joined by an associate researcher who will support the three primary analysts with writing, research projects, and other activities. In Q2, we also expect to hire an account manager to help us better manage our clients and expand our business.
Candidly, we have been in a position to hire another full-time analyst since early 2012, but we are not seeking to grow simply for growth’s sake [Sidebar: We (as many of you are) are aware of examples where fast growth and staff expansion have translated into a dilution of quality, including groups in this sector]. We will manage our growth and work vigilantly to ensure that we maintain our high-quality research and advisory as we advance forward. We will not overreach and we will never compromise quality for growth.
The goal in hiring the new research staff is to both deepen and broaden our current research coverage which we believe will mean better and more research from Ardent Partners in 2013. The new hires will also help us better scale our resources and enable the current analyst team to invest more of its time and efforts engaging with our clients and constituents, covering the technology market, and introducing new products. If you are interested in learning more about and/or applying for the new roles, please email research (at) ardentpartners (dot)com.
Ardent Partners’ Plan for 2013: Product & Service Expansion
In 2013, Ardent Partners will continue to deliver its traditional products and services but we will also aggressively expand our current offerings. For the readers of CPO Rising, our staff expansion will translate into more articles from more contributors on CPO Rising. We also have some very exciting plans for 2013 that will take advantage of our larger staff, a greater focus on technology research, and a subscriber list developed over the past three years that can be described as massive. I will summarize these below but please drop me a note if you would like to learn more about our exciting new plans and offerings.
- Greater outreach and engagement with CPOs and other procurement leaders (as well as with Finance, AP, and Shared Services leaders)
- Greater outreach and engagement with solution providers
- Much greater coverage of the technology landscape including formal reviews of market segments and solution providers, solution provider profiles and case studies, and regular technology market coverage on CPO Rising (and Payables Place)
- New research report “types” to help solution providers explain their solutions and quantify the value they generate for their clients
- Expanded thought-leadership research as evidenced by our new research agenda (which some have described as both aggressive and progressive)
- The use of new platforms to deliver more dynamic research (planned in H2 – 2013)
- The introduction of several full-service marketing support offerings for solution providers.
If you are interested in learning more about anything written above or have comments or suggestions, please email me or give me a call at 617.752.1620. As always, thank you for your interest, readership, and support.
