Gartner, Forrester and the rest are an integral part of the tech marketing community. Conventional wisdom is that if you want to get into the enterprise software market, you need to work with these groups. This may or not be true, but that’s what a lot of PR agencies preach.
But can you trust them as an enterprise customer or as a reader of the latest article that relies on analyst information?
InformationWeek has a fascinating article entitled “Credibility of Analysts”.
Research firms make their living by offering expert advice to business and technology people about the best ways to invest their IT dollars. It can be invaluable insight, but only if that analysis comes with no strings attached. And on that, there’s no guarantee.
Forrester, Gartner, IDC, and others insist their output is squeaky clean, yet they also rake in millions providing services to the very same companies they monitor, heavyweights like Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. Which leads to a question that continues to dog the research firms: How much influence do technology vendors have over their work?
Link here.
Alex Eckelberry