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Your APMdigest Blogs Pay Off - Thought Leadership Really Works, Survey Says

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Thought Leaders, people or businesses that are recognized as expert and authoritative in their market, are more likely to be called to tender (an opportunity for potential suppliers to submit an offer to supply goods or services against a detailed tender) say 72% of UK businesses, according to a
survey of more than 2,000 UK companies by consumer and business analyst MindMetre Research.

But the material they publish must be genuinely informative and credible.

The survey findings:

- When compiling a tender list for technology and equipment, 61% of companies research possible candidate suppliers on the web and will visit the company website to validate its expertise

- For companies looking for a business services supplier, the proportion rises to 70%

- 72% of UK businesses report that they are much more likely to invite a supplier to tender if their website not only describes the sales proposition, but also gives access to informative and relevant thought leadership material

- Fully 80% of businesses warn that thought leadership must be based on credible, independent research

Paul Lindsell, Managing Director of MindMetre Research says: "Companies other than management consultancies are increasingly recognizing that they can gain tangible competitive advantage by demonstrating commercially valuable ‘thought leadership’ in their customer markets. By addressing issues in the customer’s market the company shows that it is knowledgeable about these issues and can help find a solution.

"Buyer organizations evidently consider the demonstration of thought-leadership by potential suppliers to be important, and influential when deciding which supplier to use. So, while thought leadership confirms its key role in building a reputation for a new entrant into a market, established market players can also build their reputation further with customers, influencers, and stakeholders through the generation of interesting material."

Although not part of the survey, I would add that publication of your company's thought leadership content on a respected third-party industry site like APMdigest provides even more credibility - and possibly more exposure - than posting the content on your site. Just make sure to provide a link from your site to the content on APMdigest, so your potential customers will be sure to see it when they are browsing your website.

If you are a vendor in APM or related markets and would like to blog on the APMdigest Vendor Forum, CLICK HERE, and follow the first few points on the list.

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Your APMdigest Blogs Pay Off - Thought Leadership Really Works, Survey Says

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Thought Leaders, people or businesses that are recognized as expert and authoritative in their market, are more likely to be called to tender (an opportunity for potential suppliers to submit an offer to supply goods or services against a detailed tender) say 72% of UK businesses, according to a
survey of more than 2,000 UK companies by consumer and business analyst MindMetre Research.

But the material they publish must be genuinely informative and credible.

The survey findings:

- When compiling a tender list for technology and equipment, 61% of companies research possible candidate suppliers on the web and will visit the company website to validate its expertise

- For companies looking for a business services supplier, the proportion rises to 70%

- 72% of UK businesses report that they are much more likely to invite a supplier to tender if their website not only describes the sales proposition, but also gives access to informative and relevant thought leadership material

- Fully 80% of businesses warn that thought leadership must be based on credible, independent research

Paul Lindsell, Managing Director of MindMetre Research says: "Companies other than management consultancies are increasingly recognizing that they can gain tangible competitive advantage by demonstrating commercially valuable ‘thought leadership’ in their customer markets. By addressing issues in the customer’s market the company shows that it is knowledgeable about these issues and can help find a solution.

"Buyer organizations evidently consider the demonstration of thought-leadership by potential suppliers to be important, and influential when deciding which supplier to use. So, while thought leadership confirms its key role in building a reputation for a new entrant into a market, established market players can also build their reputation further with customers, influencers, and stakeholders through the generation of interesting material."

Although not part of the survey, I would add that publication of your company's thought leadership content on a respected third-party industry site like APMdigest provides even more credibility - and possibly more exposure - than posting the content on your site. Just make sure to provide a link from your site to the content on APMdigest, so your potential customers will be sure to see it when they are browsing your website.

If you are a vendor in APM or related markets and would like to blog on the APMdigest Vendor Forum, CLICK HERE, and follow the first few points on the list.

The Latest

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...