Whose job is it to make sure you get the coverage you deserve? Is the onus on the analyst, or on the firm seeking coverage? These are key questions – and if you want to know what the industry thinks, you’ll find some interesting survey responses in this posting. I raised this urgent topic in a couple of professional LinkedIn groups recently and my ad hoc research brought in a flood of (more…)
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I don’t necessarily expect everyone to be excited at the news that the 2013 Application Performance Monitoring Magic Quadrant assessment is under way. It’s a specialist field, and only a few dozen companies will be directly involved. But this year, this is one MQ that looks like raising vital issues for every IT vendor that wants to be featured in the relevant Magic Quadrant – or that has ever worried about how (more…)
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One of the innocent pleasures of life in the analyst relations business is the opportunities it sometimes offers to watch respected specialists crossing swords in public. The allegations, the counterblasts, the challenges, the clicking of heels and the slapping down and picking up of gauntlets – there’s nothing quite like a good duel to settle an argument. So the public tussle last October between Michael Rasmussen and Gartner’s French Caldwell has been (more…)
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Once upon a time, I was referred to as “a god”. It was a long time ago, and I like to think I’ve matured handsomely since then. But the point about the remark, in a reputable Connecticut newspaper, was that it wasn’t just me. Back then, in the mid-1990s, the journalist in question wrote a full-page article in which he used the phrase “the Gartner gods” in talking about me and my (more…)
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“Sorry, we can’t install your software until next year as all our support staff have met their installation scorecard quotas and are now busy now doing other things. Thank you for your call. Goodbye.” Not much of a come-on, is it? When was the last time you told one of your customers that? Never, I hope. In fact, you may already be starting to worry about my sanity. But wait a second. (more…)
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There has long been a suspicion among vendors that there is a secret love affair going on between the giants of the IT industry and leading analyst firms like Gartner and Forrester. Certainly (as we noted recently in “Can You Spend Your Way to the Top Right Corner?”) these companies spend big money wooing the analysts. But, as it turns out, this money is very often wasted. A remarkable number of big (more…)
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Watching the parade of Olympic and Paralympic athletes through central London today, I was reminded, all over again, what a fantastic success the summer’s events had been. For instance, did you see the rowing? That fantastic Men’s Eights final, with the Germans muscling their way to the gold and Canada surging past our valiant Team GB and gaining on the Germans with every stroke over the last few heart-stopping seconds? No? Shame. (more…)
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Like the team at The Skills Connection, the author of Up and to the Right, Richard Stiennon, is a Gartner refugee. He worked for Gartner as an analyst, tracking security technologies, and his day job now is as an independent security analyst. The years Richard spent at Gartner lend the book an intriguing feeling of peeking behind the curtain to see the Great Wizard of Stamford at work. But the big question, (more…)
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A memory from Joel, our US MD. When I was a little kid, I used to ride the bus to my cousins in Flatbush. The bus from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to Flatbush ran along Lee Avenue, and I used to observe all the local stores and businesses as the bus passed by. I remember the barber shop on the right side of the street, because it had a big, bold sign. “Haircuts 25 cents” (more…)
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What do companies that make the step up into the Leaders section of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant have in common? Looking back on the last quarter, our MQ Tune-Up clients have had some great successes, with four of them gaining Leaders status for the first time. That was a fine performance, and it got us thinking about why it was that these four had managed to achieve this breakthrough. As a result, we (more…)
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