Brandwatch Comes Out as a Strong Performer in New Report: Our Reaction

So, the news is out! Brandwatch has been positioned as a Strong Performer in “The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Listening Platforms, Q1 2014.” See our video reaction below, but first – how do we feel?

We feel it’s a solid ranking. Solid but – when matched against our own ambitions and belief in what we do – not spectacular.

But that’s OK, because we are confident in our platform and, what’s more, we know where we are heading, and boy does it look good (more of that in a second).

Customers come first

Looking at the scores behind the analysis, we are particularly pleased that Brandwatch scored highest in the Customers sub-category, out of all 11 vendors featured in the report. This category is scored based on active customer base, retention and revenue.

We think customers are everything, so this means the world to us. Brandwatch is now working with nearly 1,000 enterprise clients, among them some of the biggest and most admired brands in their industries, so it is satisfying to be recognised in this area.

A pat on the back to our hardworking team. And a thank you, of course, to those fantastic customers – thank you.

There are some surprises for us in how the rest of the rankings panned out – some companies did much better than we expected, and some much worse. Take a look at the report for yourself here. (Note: The report is accessible to Forrester clients; it’s available for purchase by non-clients.)

Our reaction

We were in the middle of opening our new office in San Francisco when we heard the news, so we shot this quick, informal video to give our reaction:

The future

So what’s next? Well, we have huge ambitions for the year ahead. HUGE. Having grown 101% year-on-year in 2013, we have plans to double the size of the business again.

Being a company that puts product first, we have ~65% planned growth in our development team – bringing the number of engineers up to around 90 between Brighton (UK), Berlin and Stuttgart (both Germany) by the end of 2014.

We just need these high-quality brains to continue delivering against the innovative roadmap that our product team are plotting.

Commercially, our American business is growing like crazy and now has a West Coast location as well as East Coast.

In Europe, the company’s home markets continue to grow very healthily, and we are looking to bring Brandwatch to more countries in 2014 (if you know great SaaS enterprise salespeople, we’ll want to talk to them/you).

And operationally, we are investing in support, in operations, in marketing. You get the idea. Growth across the board.

All of this will require us to do everything we humanly can to build on our strengths and improve on our weaknesses, and – with this analysis, with our own recent customer survey and with the ambitions that we collectively have – that’s exactly what we plan to do.

Onwards!