By Jim Lundy It has been a busy time here at Aragon Research. This weekend (February 16th, 2014) marks our 2.5 year anniversary. There is much to tell, but in a word – we have been growing, mainly because we have been executing our business plan, which includes serving our clients and providing both research and business advisory services. This blog post is intended to provide a short update on all of the progress and growth we have had here at Aragon.
Aragon is Growing
The one word summary of what we have been doing is growing. We signed many new clients in 2013 and maintained our renewal rate of over 90%. We have added more staff to keep up with the demand and plan on doing that in 2014 as well. We have taken no outside investment as of now, but we have been approached about this. The staff we have hired includes new full-time associates in Sales, Marketing and Research.
David Mario Smith Joins Aragon
Speaking of new Team Members, in January of this year, we announced the addition of David Mario Smith as our newest Research Director. David spent many years at Gartner and is a thought leader in Collaboration. David worked for me at Gartner and we are delighted to have him leading the charge on Collaboration and Pervasive Video at Aragon. For those that may not remember, David is the one who predicted the rise of messaging platforms, which have grown up to challenge traditional UC thinking.
Aragon Research Office in Morgan Hill, CA.
New Aragon Research Corporate Office
An indicator of our success is that we opened our new Corporate Office in Morgan Hill in November. We continue to use space in Palo Alto (Regus Facilities) but because we have more Aragon Associates as well as more clients, we needed a dedicated corporate office. For those who are reading this who are not based in Silicon Valley, we encourage you to visit us at our offices.
Research and Thought Leadership
We have been very busy delivering on our Research Agenda here at Aragon. In 2.5 years, we have published over 150 Syndicated Research Notes for our Subscribers. We maintain our current agenda for our Service, which is 4-5 research notes a month. We have also published 58 First Cuts, which are one page notes that analyze developments in the markets we cover, such as VMWare’s recent acquisition of AirWatch. All of this is in addition to the Blogs, Webinars and Podcasts we produce. Thought Leadership is a big part of our agenda. We coined the term Enterprise Mobile Management (EMM) in 2012 and we produced the first Aragon Research Globe that measured providers on EMM, not just MDM. We also predicted the Pervasive Video Era in 2011 and have discussed Video Documents and Video Enabled Business Applications (VEBAs) in our Research. We have a rigorous methodology and it enables us to produce some of our branded research such as our Aragon Research Technology Arcs. This week we will be publishing three new Technology Arcs, including a brand new one that focuses on Innovation and Digital Business.
Client Service for End Users and Technology Providers
We do work with both end user enterprises as well as technology providers. Because we have actually served in business roles (e.g. IT, Marketing, Sales), we understand the role of technology and how it intersects business. Our focus on our clients and on client service is one of the reasons we have a 90% renewal rate. We have CIOs, CEOs, CMOs and many others who are clients. We work with private, public and government clients. We know our markets and we know the participants in the markets we cover. We evaluate many of them in our Aragon Research Globe Reports, of which we have published five. A majority of our revenue comes from Research and Advisory Subscriptions and in the coming weeks we will be announcing new and updated Services that enhance what we offer to both IT and Business Executives.
2014 – The Road Ahead
2014 will be an exciting year for Aragon Research. We are executing on our agenda and spending time helping our clients with their technology, strategy and business execution. We are building a world class team here at Aragon and we are getting recognized for that. There are many other new things we will be announcing during 2014. This is all part of our business plan. We are growing, mainly because we help clients succeed. I encourage anyone reading this to reach out to me or our team to start the conversations.