Ardoq’s Year in Review 2022

2022 has, quite literally, been a year of change. We started the year under COVID restrictions, with most Ardoqians working remotely and attending all events online. Fast forward to December 2022, thanks to a comprehensive rebrand, some serious Series D funding, and one of our busiest event schedules to date, the Ardoq we started the year with has grown and changed. 

Once again, we are so proud of our achievements through yet another challenging year. We wouldn’t be where we are today without our partners, customers and, of course, our fantastic team. We wish to thank each Ardoqian for their hard work and determination. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough space to cover every piece of news but read on for a taste of the great things that happened at Ardoq in the past 12 months.

Erik Bakstad, co-founder and CEO

Rebranding Ardoq to Reflect Our Growth and Ambition

With ambitious plans and non-stop growth, our brand needed a refresh to reflect our values and new vision. Getting back to “normal” post-pandemic felt like the perfect time to tackle our own company-wide change project: a full rebranding. 

Aside from a shiny new logo, our rebrand meant making company-wide democratic decisions - something we’re committed to helping our customers achieve. Our core mission is bringing brilliant people together, and the rebranding process embodied this. The process reflected our strengths, growth, and confidence in taking us into an exciting new stage. 

Securing Series D Funding for Ardoq’s Next Chapter

One of our biggest “wins” for 2022 was securing $125 million USD in Series D funding. This will fund Ardoq’s continued global expansion as we invest further in our commercial platform, best-in-class product offering, and growing teams.

Now we are in the perfect position to supercharge our global expansion in 2023 and beyond. We look forward to doubling down on commercial excellence, all while continuing to support the digital business execution of organizations and enterprises all across the world.

Live, In Person Events 

After two years of online-only conferences, getting back to the “real world” and meeting people in person felt especially good. We hit the events trail hard, attending conferences all over the world alongside running our Behind the Future webinars and kickstarting a brand new Amplify Webinar Series. 

Alongside six virtual events, our team attended 13 events across the globe, including conferences organized by Gartner, CampIT, and Axaz, in locations such as New York, Barcelona, and Frankfurt. Closer to home, we organized six of our “Behind the Future” streaming sessions, featuring talks with EA experts from a range of industries and regions. These online events attracted a grand total of 2,489 registrants eager to know more about the latest and greatest in Enterprise Architecture. Together with two of our Amplify Webinars, which garnered over 1,400 sign-ups, we proved that despite the return to normal post-pandemic, there is still a healthy appetite for online gatherings and industry-sharing sessions. Join our mailing list to get first dibs on our events for 2023.

Celebrating and Connecting With Our People Post-Pandemic

How better to celebrate our growth than to fly the whole company to Iceland. To mark the end of government-enforced home offices and the easing of travel restrictions, we made the daring plan to organize a company-wide meet-up of Ardoqians from across the world. All our colleagues, new and old, finally had a chance to connect, forming bonds to carry us through our next steps of growth. 

This year we celebrated some of our employees. Øyvind Sæbø developed and launched ​​Apache TinkerPop’s official Gremlin code formatter. We also launched a regular employee spotlight series to showcase some of our superstars: Flo Orford, Software Engineer; Pia Roland, Global Director of Customer Success; Hana Wright, Manager of Customer Success, North America; and Robin Fitzhugh, Sales Director, UK. 

We also attended SaaSiest 2022, which brought together the Nordic B2B SaaS community for its annual gathering. The two-day event featured tactical sessions, workshops, keynote addresses, and talks from across the SaaS industry, including from our co-founder and CEO, Erik Bakstad, and our VP of Operations, Nick Peters.

Strengthening Our Sales 

It has been a rollercoaster year for Ardoq’s Sales team. We’ve grown across all regions, meaning more fantastic customers are starting to use Ardoq. To support all of this growth, we’ve hired a total of 19 new Sales colleagues. Alongside this success, we’ve had some internal wins, with six of our Business Development Representatives (BDRs) being promoted to Account Executives (AEs), and AEs moving up to Lead AEs for their respective territories. 

Diversity and Inclusion as We Scale Our People

As a scale-up, we’re hiring lots of new employees, with 110 colleagues either joining in 2022 or due to start in early 2023. The total number of different nationalities at Ardoq now stands at 44. We’ve even added some new departments, like our Professional Services group. This group provides support throughout the customer journey, offering our customers further support with paid services on top of our existing customer success team. This means we can support even the largest enterprises across all of our core markets.

Throughout all this growth, it’s important for us that all our candidates have equal chances and that we have diverse employees. We take care to avoid prejudice by using software that removes bias from the initial screening process and providing training to hiring managers, so they understand how to be inclusive. In early 2022, the Diversity and Inclusion Team at Ardoq identified the need for in-house training. The Norwegian Ministry for Integration and Diversity (IMDi) provided a grant, allowing us to bring in external consultancy, Umbrella, to deliver six workshops covering a variety of topics from unconscious bias to inclusive recruitment. We’re taking what we’ve learned this year to build on for next year.

Partnering for Success

2022 has been a year of immense growth for our Partner team, with partner sales doubling. It was also a year of rewarding in-person visits and first meetings with some of our great partners like Slalom, GBM, Atea, Bespoke, and ilionx – just to name a few. We very much look forward to accelerating our partnerships for more win-wins in 2023.

Democratizing Data to Enable Engagement and Collaboration 

Our goal is to provide the best possible tool for our customers. Through our releases, customers are enabled to increase engagement and collaboration with stakeholders across their organization.

In 2022, we had a significant launch, Ardoq Discover. Ardoq Discover is a must-have tool for any organization seeking an efficient way to support growth. Discover provides non-EA decision-makers with an intuitive way to explore enterprise architecture insights and contribute their domain knowledge.

Features Our Customers Love

• Enrich your data automatically with new calculated URL and email fields

Ardoq users can now automatically link their components and references to websites and email addresses. With calculated fields, users can efficiently populate and improve their architecture repository’s data quality.

• Bring data into Ardoq quickly

The just-released REST API simplifies writing new integrations with Ardoq. The user-friendly API documentation takes a step-by-step approach that guides users through the whole setup using the new public Developer Portal. 

• Rationalize your application portfolio quickly and continuously

The new Application Rationalization Use Case Guide shortens time-to-value and identifies rationalization opportunities within 6-8 weeks. In following iterations, a strategic update can take as little as a week. In contrast, traditional rationalization processes take months.

Better Data Overall

• Simplify data analysis to see relationships

The updated Relationships View improves decision-making by visualizing organizational complexity. Added capabilities include collapsible groups, bundle relationships, reference labeling, highlighting disconnected components, and interactive legends.

• Understand where your critical data is created, used, and stored 

The new Data Lineage Use Case Guide keeps regulations and standards up-to-date while protecting data quality.

• Create seamless workflows and improve data governance

Recent improvements to the Engagement Module help Enterprise Architects ensure data is a living, breathing tool, easily accessible and operable by the right stakeholders at any time. To help Enterprise Architects maintain control of EA data. Ardoq has implemented a notification system that helps them easily stay on top of all changes.

• Share and view data across your organization

Reports cuts out data silos and increases trust in analytics. Enterprise architects can bypass workspace permission and invite key stakeholders to a report. 

The Season of Giving

Every year, we mark the season of giving with a donation to our chosen charity. 2022 will be our fourth year working with Sabona, supporting their efforts to make sustainable, positive change for Zimbabweans living in Northern Matabeleland. We admire how they empower people, working towards some of The United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Their projects focus on health, education, agriculture, and entrepreneurship.

This year we’re donating about $40 USD for each of our 219 Ardoqians to Sabona’s education initiatives and food stations. Sabona provides students with 280,560 meals yearly, collaborates with local primary schools to support vulnerable children by paying their school tuition fees, and covers higher education school tuition fees while supporting them with mentor programs.   

A Magical End to the Year

Finally, we’re ending this year on a high with the news that Ardoq has been recognized as a Leader in the December 2022 Gartner® Magic QuadrantTM for Enterprise Architecture Tools report for the second year in a row. This inclusion as a Leader from a world-leading consultancy firm, Gartner®, is a fitting end to another busy and successful year. 

Thank you for joining us as we bring 2022 to a close. We hope this article gave you a taste of what we’ve been up to over the last 12 months. To stay up-to-date with our latest news, events, opinions, and more, please subscribe to our Digital Transformation Newsletter.

See you in 2023!