This story caught my eye today: “Forrester Research has the highest gross margin the IT Consulting Industry“. Over the last two years of economic difficulty, Gartner and Forrester have almost always outperformed the US stock markets, and other analyst firms have continued to grow in value. IT advisory firms has continued to grow even in years when the stock prices of IT giants like Cisco, HP, Intel, Microsoft and even Google have underperformed the S&P 500.

It seems that while AR resources are declining, and analysts are also under increasing productivity pressures, the profitability of analyst firms is holding stronger than the rest of the high tech market.