Ashmanov & Partners

Ashmanov & Partners («АиП», A&P) — Russian privately held company specializing in Information technologies, online marketing, software development (i.e., search engines), and AI-powered software. Founded in 2001 by Igor Ashmanov and ex-Rambler top managers, it has multiple subsidiaries in the same industry.

Ashmanov & Partners
Type of site
private limited company, online marketing
Founded2001 (2001)
Headquartersul. Vereyaskaya, 29/134, Moscow, Russia, 121357
Area servedRussia, Vietnam
Founder(s)Igor Ashmanov
Key peopleIgor Ashmanov, managing partner
IndustryInternet
Servicesonline marketing, online advertising, search engines optimization
Employees300+ (July 2017)
SubsidiariesKribrum
Remparo
Wicron
Metahouse
Informatic
Nanosemantics
Wada!
Roem.ru
URLwww.ashmanov.com

History

Ashmanov & Partners was founded in 2007 by Igor Ashmanov who, a month prior to that, left the position of chief executive officer at Rambler, one of the leading web portals in Runet at the time. During his time at Rambler, the company had a fervent ownership rotation, while none of the new owners expressed interest in further development of the flagship Rambler.ru website, mostly focusing on reselling the business on and on.

Having little-to-no start-up capital, Ashmanov launched his own company and was soon joined by former colleagues from Rambler who later became business partners.[1]

Business expansion
Russia

In 2011, Ashmanov & Partners opened an office in Saint-Petersburg following market's demand for high-quality online marketing education. In 2013, the company also opened an office in Novosibirsk. Both regional offices focus on education activities and provide online marketing services for local businesses.

Vietnam

Since 2011, Ashmanov & Partners develops Wada! search engine and affiliated services for the Vietnam market. By the time the project started, 95% shared of the local search market was owned by Google, however little work was done on context advertising, news aggregators, mobiles services etc., which is what the Wada! team focused on. Initial investment was estimated at US$10.3 million, with Finam holdings (Russia) and Kusto (Kazakhstan) as co-investors. In 2014, monthly audience was estimated at 1.6 million people.

Statistics

Over 300 people are currently employed in three offices of the company in Russia. As reported[2] by The Firm's Secret magazine in 2011, Ashmanov & Partners serviced over 1,000 clients monthly and had a total market share of 5—10 % in Russian on-line marketing industry.

In 2007, the annual gross volume of Ashmanov & Partners was estimated by Finam Holdings at US$2.5 million. According to annual web studios' rating by Factus, based on publicly available tax reports, gross volume of Ashmanov & Partners in 2015 was over ₽300 million, VAT not included.[3]

Products and services

Antispam

In 2001, Ashmanov & Partners developed antispam technologies and got a contract from Kaspersky Lab. The first version of Spamtest for FreeBSD and Linux, as well as public Spamtest.ru service were released in 2002. A year later it was integrated into Mail.ru, and the up-to-date version of the product is currently used by large companies such as Beeline, MTS, Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange, Masterhost, Peterlink etc.

In 2005, the project was acquired by Kaspersky Lab for estimated US$3 million.[4] Later, Spamtest became part of Kaspersky Linux Mail Server Security.

Integrated online marketing

Online marketing activities include, but are not limited to:

Using these and other on-line marketing channels is commonly dictated by an online marketing strategy that aims to solve particular business needs such as raising sales volume, increasing on-site conversion rate etc.

SEO

Ashmanov & Partners was among the first Russian companies to provide search engine optimization services commercially. The company developed now commonly used terminology and in 2002 held the first conference on SEO (Optimization) in Russia.

In 2005, the company released Site-Auditor software to select search queries based on analysis of a client's website. In 2006, the company released free SeoRate on-line service to track SERP visibility of websites and compare it to those of their competition. A year later, commercial version of SeoRate was released.

Context advertising

Since 2002, Ashmanov & Partners have been developing various technologies assisting in placing advertisement. In 2004, the company developed a geotargeting technology, as well as Semantic Mirror — a technology for automatic web page topic identification. Both were used by Begun advertising network, as well as by companies such as Mamba and AdFox. Since 2005, Ashmanov & Partners provides context advertising management services.

In 2007, context advertising's market share surpassed display advertising for the first time in Russia, and together with IMHO VI advertising agency, Ashmanov & Partners co-founded Blondinka.ru. In 2009, Blondinka.ru gained a system for optimized automatic context and display ads placement on all popular Russian websites. In 2010, Ashmanov & Partners sold its 47% share in the company to Blondinka.ru co-founder Arsen Revazov.

Education activities

Since 2002, the company organizes annual conferences on search engine optimization and online marketing with mostly case studies and workshops by industry's leading experts:

The company also organizes its sections at Russian Internet Forum[7] and Russian Internet Week (RIW).[8]

Since 2003, Ashmanov & Partners publishes a bi-monthly newsletter with case studies by company's experts.

In 2006, Igor Ashmanov and Andrey Ivanov had their "Search engine optimization of website" book published by the Piter publishing house. The book became a business bestseller and was reissued multiple times with updates.

In 2014, Ashmanov & Partners founded On-line Marketing Academy (Академия интернет-маркетинга) where industry's experts from both A&P and rival companies educate students. The academy features both long and crash courses, as well as 1-day long seminars focused on specific narrow topics.

Kribrum

In 2010, Ashmanov & Partners and InfoWatch co-founded Kribrum (Latin: решето),[9] a social media monitoring service for brand management, data leaks prevention and information security.

Company's clients are large Russian and international companies with multiple brands who get from hundreds to tens of thousands mentions online daily, which makes it impractical to track them manually. Kribrum is capable of automatically analyzing text in English, Russian, and Arabic, and can be configured for particular industry's specifics. As reported[10] by Vedomosti in 2013, monitoring a brand on social media with Kribrum costs between 50K and 200K rubles monthly.

Kribrum's own subsidiaries are Diktum (founded in 2011, technologies for analyzing texts in natural language)[11] and Informatiс (acquired in 2010, releases ORFO spell checker used in e.g. Russian version of Microsoft Office. Development of ORFo was managed by Igor Ashmanov in 1991—1995.

In March 2016, it was announced that a new federal-level social media monitoring and information attacks prevention system would be developed by Ashmanov & Partners and InfoWatch in Innopolis, Tatarstan. Later same year, Kribrum received a large investment from InfoWatch and the Foundation of The Ministry for Communications and the Media.[12]

AI and applied robotics

Since 2001, one of the main development direction in Ashmanov & Partners is artificial intelligence — creating a man-machine natural language interaction system. In 2005, this department was separated out into a new business entity, Nanosemantics, co-owned by Ashmanov & Partners and Natalya Kaspersky's InfoWatch. In 2009, the company launched iii.ru on-line service where users could create chat bots (infs) and virtual consultants. By 2013, iii.ru users created over 2 million chat bots, and Nanosemantics became profitable in the B2B market.

In 2012, A&P invested into development of Webot, a remote presence robot designed by a group of Bauman university students. Wicron, the company behind the project, got an initial investment of ca. $500K. Since 2014, Wicron has been working on Lexy, a desktop virtual voice assistant in a smart speaker form factor. Lexy can understand natural language and verbally respond to the owner, simulating emotions. It has a basic set of features such as reporting on weather forecast, traffic jams, news, integrates with social media, can read texts aloud, and has some IoT capabilities. Webot-Lexy integration is on the roadmap.

Owners

Ashmanov & Partners was registered in 2001 as a privately held company and was reorganized into a private limited company in 2015. The majority shareholder is its founder and managing partner Igor Ashmanov.

Minor shares are held by top managers — Alexey Ivanov (Semantic Mirror etc.), Alexey Tutubalin (search engine, highload systems), Kirill Zorky (artificial intelligence), Dmitry Pashko (web services for SEO) and Michale Volovich (applied linguistics, usability).[13] Until 2013, 30% of the shares were held by Finam Holdings.

Subsidiaries

Ashmanov & Partners has a number of subsidiaries, both acquired and started by the company. The subsidiaries are not part of any formal corporate group, but they use resources by both Ashmanov & Partners and sibling companies. Some of these companies are:

  • Nanosemantics (since 2005) — development of chat bots for websites, phones, and consumer electronics;[14]
  • Wicron (since 2012) — development of remote presence robots;[15]
  • Lexy (since 2014) — development of a virtual voice assistant in a smart speaker form factor;
  • Kribrum (since 2010) — social media monitoring system for online reputation management.;
  • Informatic (since 2010) — development of ORFO spell checker and stylistics assistant;[16]
  • Osmino (since 2012) — development of mobile search apps;
  • Metahouse (с 2010 года) — extraction and monitoring of structured data from websites (prices, schedules etc.) for e-commerce projects;[17]
  • Wada! (since 2011) — search engine and on-line services for Vietnamese users;
  • Roem.ru (since 2007) — on-line magazine about Russian online business;
  • Firrma.ru (since 2012) — on-line magazine specializing on startups and venture investment.

Awards and ratings

Awards
  • ROTOR, winner of Corporate website of the year nomination, 2008
  • Runet Prize, winner of Technologies and innovations nomination, 2009
  • Runet Prize, winner of Science and education nomination, 2013
  • AdIndex Awards, winner of Search optimization nomination, 2015

Ratings
  • SEONews: Brand awareness rating for SEO agencies, 1st place (2009)
  • SEONews: Brand awareness rating for SEO agencies, 2nd place (2010)
  • SEONews: Brand awareness rating for SEO agencies, 1st place (2011)
  • SEONews: Brand awareness rating for SEO agencies, 2nd place (2012)
  • SEONews: Brand awareness rating for SEO agencies, 3rd place (2013)
  • AdIndex: Quality level rating, Search engine optimization segment, 1st place (2015)
  • AdIndex: Collaboration level rating, Search engine optimization segment, 1st place (2013)
  • AdIndex: Collaboration level rating, Search engine optimization segment, 2nd place (2014)

References
  1. Guriyev V. С лимоном. — Computerra magazine, 24 May 2007.
  2. Rusyaeva P. Последняя перекличка. — The Firm's Secret magazine, 1 March 2011. — #3. — pp. 70.
  3. 2015 rating. — official Factus website.
  4. Дорохов, Р. «Спамтест» для Касперского. — Vedomosti, № 1411, 19 August 2005
  5. eTarget conference, official website.
  6. Optimization conference, official website.
  7. Продвижение в мобильниках: сайты, приложения, трафик Archived August 15, 2016, at the Wayback Machine. Секция «Ашманов и партнеры». — Official RIF+KIB 2016 website.
  8. «Ашманов и партнеры» на RIW-2015 Archived April 14, 2016, at the Wayback Machine. — Официальный сайт «АиП», 28 October 2015.
  9. Боярский, А. Игорь Ашманов: «В Интернете можно предсказать судьбы мира». — E-xecutive.ru, 19 January 2011.
  10. Голицына, А. Поиск смысла в Рунете. — Vedomosti, № 3376, 1 July 2013.
  11. Технологии Archived June 29, 2016, at the Wayback Machine. — Официальный сайт компании «Диктум».
  12. Kantyshev P. First Rosinfocominvest deal. — «Ведомости», № 4128, 1 August 2016.
  13. Our team. — official A&P website.
  14. About the company. — official Nanosemantics website.
  15. About us. — Official Wicron website.
  16. About the company. — Official Informatic's website.
  17. . — Official Metahouse's website.
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