As predicted, there’s a lot of change at Ovum as its purchase by Datamonitor moves ahead. Chief Research Officer, Tony Lavender, has been set to leave the company since the summer. However, the news follows the recent departure of Daniel Bieler, Ovum’s research director in Germany covering the telecoms market. Other long-time Ovum staff leaving this month include CEO Chris Dines and Fash Darabi, Corporate Development Director. However, we don’t think that’s the start of a major analyst exodus.
The departure of Dines and Darabi is unsurprising, since they were shareholders in Ovum as well as holders of now-redundant senior management roles. Ovum is making a number of ‘back office’ and services roles redundant. As a result, a few of the firm’s experienced administrative staff are also looking for new opportunities (let them, or me, know if you want to hire one).
Ovum may regret the loss of Lavender and Bieler. Both have long histories at Ovum, having worked for the firm when I was there in the late 1990s (Bieler sat opposite me). Someone will replace Lavender, while Ovum is searching for a new Principal Analyst to join Jessica Figueras‘ practice to look at the next-generation telecoms issues that Bieler followed.
Dan Bieler is now joining IDC’s European Telecommunications & Networking Consulting business as consulting director. He will advise on topics including next-generation networks (NGN), multimedia convergence and Web 2.0 in Europe. IDC has now around 200 industry analysts in EMEA. Lavender is becoming managing director at Analysys Research; we’ll discuss that tomorrow.
So far, the rate of turnover in Ovum’s research team isn’t much different from the normal start-of year turnover. Furthermore, that has to be put in the context of substantial growth in Ovum’s consulting team over the last half-year; it might even have doubled.
On Thursday the IIAR will be meeting with the two Datamonitor executives leading the expansion of that firm’s technology businesses: Anthony Parslow (ex-Forrester) and Tim Royston-Webb (ex-Giga). We’ll update you on that discussion, of course.
P.S. Analysts will continue to come and go at Ovum, but we’ll look closely to see if the trend changes. Other managers are set to leave including Fiona Glennon, who we mentioned in October. For example, we also know that one of the firm’s telecoms software analysts is leaving. However, most of the recent analyst departures were agreed before the acquisition.
