Over the last month Influencer Relations’ Analyst Firm Awards for 2014 have gone from successful to monumental.
In every category, the growing centrality of cloud solutions means that analyst firms with a convincing leadership in the services space have pushed into every market niche. The conversation about has been huge, with 377,000 mentions in the week when we announced the global award, 178,000 the following week and a total of 600,000 in the last six weeks.
We looked at the ten firms delivering the most value for users in the services industry, and this is what we found: ten special firms that are the most powerful and valuable in the services market.
Gartner staff were very proud of the firm’s number one placement in the global rankings. They tweeted about it again, and again, and again. In the Analyst Value Survey, most of its users in the cloud and services segments were on the vendor side, with a global spread.- HfS Research was an especially strong reputation for outsourcing and IT services strategy research, but many of its users feel that its is also very influential on buyers. Unusually, its users were split evenly between the demand and supply side.
- Forrester Research‘s users are even more tightly concentrated in the vendor community. It performed notably well in Europe. Alongside outsourcing, its users in the services and cloud space are looking for insight into big data and analytics.
- NelsonHall has a much stronger position on the services side than on cloud. Fascinatingly, for a European-headquartered firm, it now has more users in North America than in Europe.
- IDC (when added together with its Financial and Manufacturing Insights brands) has a strong global footprint but is held back by its weaker social media profile. Its users are fairly evenly split between the Americas and the Old World, but heavily concentrated on the vendor side.
- A trusted outsourcing leader, Everest Group, developed great momentum this year. It was notable in having a similar balance between demand- and the supply-side users. It performed especially well in Asia.
- Digital Clarity Group was the only firm in the top ten with a three to one ratio between demand-side and supply-side users. Its uniquely insightful research into the intersection between software and services makes it tremendously helpful to end-users.
- ISG‘s client base looks more and more like NelsonHall’s, with a preponderance of supply-side users and a balance between users in the Old World and the New World.
- Greyhound Research is the analyst industry’s answer to The Little Engine that Could. But it’s not just optimism and hard work which has pushed this small firm into the top ten. Greyhound’s laser focus on the Asian market is unique, and its users are especially hungry for insight into cloud platforms and applications.
- 451 Research rounds out our top ten, and could have come higher. Its users are concentrated in North America and Europe, reflecting the firm’s limited investment in freemium and social diffusion. But it seems to have some powerful insight on big data and cloud infrastructure, which the supply-side values highly. It is also notable as one of the firms people think most influence investors.
What to know more? Pick up your copy of the Analyst Value Survey, where the base data come from.
This post originally appeared on InfluencerRelations.com.
