Brian Sommer’s devastating indictment of the analyst community will likely raise the hackles of a few people I know. It’s been a long time a-coming. I’m with Brian that it’s about time analysts delivered value. The landscape has changed and there is a much richer set of resources from which to poll advice.
So it was refreshing to hear from the CEO of a mid-range company that has decided it doesn’t need Gartner. It asked to be excused from participating in a Magic Quadrant analysis. Gartner’s response?
We’ll decide whether your company is part of the Magic Quadrant.
That’s interesting. If the company concerned does not wish to participate and therefore pass over the information Gartner seeks, then how can Gartner claim to have conducted an independent review of the market upon which it reports? What would happen if all companies declined?
I don’t know any single buying decision that hinged on the words of an industry analyst’s report. As a way of sanity checking the market, maybe. That means those $100K+ subscription fee line items in the marketing budget plus all the trips these folk get ferried around to are…a total waste of money. And buyers pay for it through inflated software prices.
I repeat – the best ways to understand software usage patterns is by speaking to users, discover their needs and then let the developers loose. Developers still have an important role in innovation. Where most software companies fail is in their attention to post implementation relationships. Some are trying and it is here that analysts could re-invent themselves as community facilitators. But they will need to be much more business focused than they are today. And demonstrably independent. If they cannot, then they are merely marketers and should be described as such.
