Who we are and how this works
Independent from day one.
Ian Kar
Managing Partner · Product
Mr. Kar is Managing Partner at Arcana Research, where he leads product development, platform architecture, and go-to-market strategy. He built the Arcana platform and its design system.
Prior to Arcana, Mr. Kar was a journalist at The Atlantic, a product lead at Acorns, and the founder of Fintech Today, an independent research publication covering financial technology that was acquired by S&P Global. He holds expertise in AI-native product development and enterprise technology markets.
Kenneth Male
Senior Partner · Research
Mr. Male is Senior Partner at Arcana Research, where he leads the firm’s research methodology and practitioner panel development. He designed the AI Enterprise Pulse and oversees the four proprietary indices.
With over 30 years of enterprise benchmarking and executive research experience, Mr. Male built the original enterprise IT research practice at The InfoPro, where he was mentored by Gideon Gartner, founder of Gartner. His work has spanned IT infrastructure, cloud computing, and enterprise AI across Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 organizations.
Operating principles that shape everything we build.
Independence is the product.
Everything about the business model protects research integrity. Vendors pay for access, not influence.
Craft is the moat.
Anyone can produce data. We make it feel like something worth presenting to a board.
No pre-review, no influence.
Vendor partners see findings after publication. No exceptions. No editorial control.
Treat practitioners like they’re worth $1,000/hour.
Every interaction should feel like a premium membership, not a transaction.
Radical transparency on the business model.
How we make money is public. Sponsored content is clearly labeled and separated from research.
Radical transparency. No fine print.
Practitioners participate for free.
Complete the quarterly study, receive a tear sheet, peer comparison, four indices, and community membership. No fees. No catch. Your data funds the research.
Vendors buy access to the results.
Anonymized, aggregated findings from the Pulse study. No vendor gets individual respondent data. No vendor can influence study design or question selection.
Deep-dive studies are sponsor-supported.
Business use case studies are supported by technology vendors who want to understand their buyers. Arcana controls the methodology — sponsors receive the results, not editorial control.