Ovum, the European analyst house, held its annual alumni event last week. A friend sent these highlights:
- Ovum’s revenues are on track for beating previous £20M peak within the next 12 months. That’s $35M or €30M – not bad considering the firm’s comparatively modest investments in sales and marketing.
- They have further raided Yankee Group in the last 12 months. It looks like many senior Yankee analysts worth their salt are now with Ovum: Roger Entner, Chris Lewis, and XJ Wang.
- Ovum has new office in Hong Kong, and its China market is growing rapidly.
- Wireless Intelligence (a joint GSM Alliance/Ovum service) is growing well and the back-end team of analysts is growing as well.
- Ovum’s CEO Chris Dines produced a slide showing the annual revenue of Europe’s Telcos to be $360 Billion whereas Microsoft’s projected revenue for fiscal year ending June 2006 is $46 Billion. Reportedly, Chris was a bit coy on where he was coming from with this slide but I think he was indicating that he felt that, given Yankee’s problems and Ovum’s European base, that there was a lot of extra revenue for Ovum to shoot at with European Telcos, even compared with any other space. (I am sure Chris would not have been making a point about the rationale for Yankee’s vocal opposition to Linux extremists).
Ovum’s openness to its alumni reflects its transparent culture and the low ‘power distance’ inside the firm. And it’s an illustration of the firm’s pun-crazy English roots that the alumni association is called the Scrambled Egg Club. It’s eggcellent to see this tradition continue.