January 12, 2022 — Sarita Kincaid, senior director of analyst relations for SugarCRM, describes analyst relations (AR) as “a great accidental career for me.” 

She told attendees at the ARchitect User Forum this past December that she stumbled into AR by chance, coming from a marketing, PR and broadcasting background. “I love the field; it’s super-exciting,” Sarita shared. That excitement – along with her talent and strategic mindset – helped parlay a fortuitous AR opportunity at Cisco into an award-winning, 15+ year career in the field, positively impacting many AR programs and businesses. (In addition to SugarCRM and Cisco, Sarita has directed AR at Huawei and Oracle.) And we’re thrilled she has been an ARInsights client and ARchitect user since 2008!

Sarita was one of many ARInsights users recently honored in the 2021 IIAR> Awards. The IIAR> (Institute of Influencer & Analyst Relations), a non-profit professional group and partner of ours, fields a comprehensive survey each year, asking analysts, AR practitioners and other IIAR> community members to nominate standout professionals they work with, evaluating them on a number of dimensions. This year, hundreds of votes came in from 23 countries – and the winners are both impressive and inspiring!

Congratulations to the ARInsights users below on their IIAR> awards, reflecting tremendous AR accomplishments:

Analyst Relations Professional of the Year

Runners up:

Analyst Relations Team of the Year

Winner:

Runners up: 

A couple more shout-outs:

  • Congrats to our partner Starsight Communications, named Analyst Relations Agency of the Year runner-up. As a new B2B influencer and analyst relations agency (founded in 2021), Starsight is already delivering big results.
  • IDC took home the prize for 2021 Analyst Firm of the Year, based on votes from the AR community, its regional and industry coverage, the breadth of its research programs and the quality of its insights. At ARInsights, we always enjoy and appreciate the opportunity to work with IDC and its president Crawford Del Prete, and commend them on this honor.

Congratulations again to the companies and individuals above for their outstanding work in the field. As we’ve described before, the analyst relations job description can be a daunting one – requiring excellent communications, project management, collaboration and presentation skills, and more. These winners are combining people, process and technology in an exemplary way to make an impact within their teams and across their companies at large.