[Note: this guest post is from Rick Shuri the CTO of ARInsights, the provider of the ARchitect™ ARM (Analyst Relations Management) system. ]
Over time our clients ask for a variety of new features to be added to ARchitect. One of the requests was to advise them on which analysts were getting the most attention from AR staff. ARchitect users can easily get these types of reports based on the data they have entered, and analyze the data to ensure they are focusing their efforts on the most influential analysts in their market space.
However, knowing the relative importance of an analyst among all vendors was not something a client could obtain. We elected to compute a set of statistics based not on a single client, but as an aggregate of all our clients. Using this method we produced an overall ranking of those analysts that our vendor clients seem to feel are most important. Without revealing other client information it also gives an AR team a sense as to which analysts may be busy working with other vendors.
ARchitect™ Power 100 analysts are the top one hundred analysts ranked according to their activity level among all ARchitect users. These are the analysts with the most sustained “buzz” in the industry right now.
In order to create the ranking we considered a wide range of criteria which included the frequency of interactions, emails, and captured research & media as well as how recently each of the postings was entered. Obviously those analysts with a lot of current activity are high on the radar of the client teams. A ranking algorithm assigns different weighted averages to each factor and employs certain data smoothing techniques. Analysts are re-ranked daily to reflect all current aggregate activity.
The most current analyst list information is available in a number of ways:
- We place a small icon next to their name on the profile page for each Power 100 analyst. This alerts you when you look at their current information.
- Most filter pages allow you to select the Power 100 as part of the filter criteria
- A pre-built report will list the most current ranking and can be printed or exported to Excel
- We highlight all the Power 100 analysts for any given coverage
Each client must determine which analysts are influential in their specific market space and activity by other AR teams may or may not be useful. However, using this ranking along with other vendor-specific criteria such as market coverage or vendor-assigned tier is one way to gather data about the relative influence of a particular analyst.
For more information about ARchitect you can visit our site by clicking here.
Rick Shuri, CTO ARInsights
Building a Community 
This could have been an interesting post if it’d gone past the sales pitch.
Not that I am not interested to learn about ARchitect, but it would be great to know who are those analysts attracting most attention. I mean not by name because it’s most probably and for obvious reasons confidential, but which types and why?
Is that because of perceived influence on deals?
Is that because they write more?