Feb 26, 2021
Blake Bartlett is the CEO
of Janes, the well known and trusted provider of open source
defense intelligence. In this OODAcast we examine lessons learned
from Blake’s career and path from a young student with a desire for
a career in sports to success in the domain of sales.
Blake believes sales is a
perfect area for someone who has harnessed their passion for sports
and winning and the ability to connect with people. From
there he grew to leadership of several highly regarded market
intelligence organizations culminating in his current role as the
CEO Janes, the first and arguably most highly successful provider
of open source analysis for defense intelligence.
Blake’s insights into success with sales is relevant across
multiple domains of products and services, and has clearly served
him well throughout his entire career. And his ability to connect
with people and form trust based relationships has also clearly
helped him as he needed to connect with customers, employees and
stakeholders of Janes when he tool the helm in 2014.
Janes is a widely known brand with a rich history. The firm
began in 1989 when Fred T. Jane began selling encyclopedic insights
and sketches of ships in the now iconic “Janes Fighting Ships”.
From that beginning Janes evolved into a major media publisher,
then with the rise of the Internet age evolved into online services
and now has evolved more into a provider of verifiable, trusted and accurate open
source intelligence across defence equipment, military
capabilities, security and defence budgets, markets and
forecasts.
Blake walks us through his assessment of the strengths of Janes
when he assumed his leadership position including the trust and
strength of the brand, but also spells out clearly how he
recognized the need for change. The way one of his customers put it
was that Janes was in danger of becoming the “Blackberry of the
information industry ” where data and information was the best but
the hardest to find. This motivated a push to make Janes
information more findable, digestible and actionable by users and
resulted in the Janes of today.
In the discussion we examine some of Janes more interesting
capabilities including new applications available now to any
analyst seeking insights in to defense capabilities and operations
of nations around the world. Janes now provides streams of data to
organizations that want to integrate these insights into their own
systems but also provides advanced applications that enable
analysts to interoperate directly with data and analysis. Their
content includes:
– More than 40,000
profiles of military equipment (air, land and sea) in production
and use around the globe
– Inventories for more than 190 countries, ORBATs for 17,700
military units and 8,900 bases
– Structured, consistent database of events related to terrorism,
risk and security
– Defence budgets for 105 countries and procurement programmes
across military aircraft, combat vehicles and military ships
– Market assessments, opportunities across 19 markets and data on
over 7,000 defence industry organisations
– Security assessments and analysis of CBRN response capabilities,
production and proliferation
Janes also provides training and education on the art and
tradecraft of open source intelligence and services and support to
organizations seeking to operationalize Janes capabilities to
optimize decision-making.
For more see:
