One fascinating discussion I’ve been following is whether or not a majority of META’s people are now at Gartner. Since META’s purchase, lots of that company’s former have found themselves outside Gartner. This has led many people, including us, to see the purchase as being closer to an assasination, a simple removal of a competitor, rather than a merger which generated synergies.
As Gartner’s guest at Symposium in Orlando, however, I was honestly surprised to be told that this was not the case: most META people are at Gartner. I was told that those who have moved on are mainly in back office roles, and most of the research- and revenue-generating people are indeed at Gartner. They promosed me to send me some written confirmation of that… and I am still looking forward to it.
However, one could be forgiven for thinking that Gartner’s confidence is misplaced, especially with the observation that the departures are continuing. After a crop of hiring by Forrester, there is now not a single member of the META benchmarking group, over here in Europe, left at Gartner. They have gone to different places, including Luenendonk and Accenture, but three are at Forrester: Lutz Peichert (formerly Vice President Consulting and part of the Executive Directions team), outsourcing performance expert Wolfgang Benkel and managing consultant Rudiger Krojnewski.
It’s an especially interesting expression of Forrester’s interest in hiring META people, because those three won’t be focussing on benchmarking at Forrester. Forrester has just partnered with Maturity Consulting to give clients benchmarking studies, so those three are now able to climb out of a niche and work across broader IT strategy issies. Maturity, of course, was founded by the former management of Gartner in Germany.
