Last week we were lucky enough to get some time to speak with Chris Lafond, Gartner’s CFO, and discuss the integration of META’s operations. It’s an issue of great interest to readers of this blog, and the objective limits on Gartner’s ability to say more earlier clearly worried some earlier this year, even to the…
Each January Lighthouse surveys an international group of CIOs to find out how, and why, they are using industry analysts. The scale of the study is quite unique. Across Europe, for example, we surveying more than 100 CIOs in each key markets — giving our last study 12 times more technology buyers than our friends…
It’s funny: I was just speaking to someone today who is collecting predictions for 2006 from her colleagues, so that they can track themselves against their competitors’ accuracy in some way. It was all thrown into context by this great comment to ‘Analyst Equity’ by Louis Columbus, who points out that many analysts will be…
We’ve had a number of fascinating discussions recently about the pace of mergers and acquisitions in the analyst industry. The pace of change in especially strong in the outsourcing area, where EquaTerra and TPI have merged, and where there are further realignments afoot involving Hackett. There’s an excellent summary of some of the trends and…
Hill & Knowlton’s commitment to analyst relations has been deepened by the appointment of Astrid Krone, of the Gambit PR agency in Norway, as its Head of Industry Analyst Relations in EMEA. Gambit’s announcement of the appointment stresses that communications with industry analysts is of growing important to the international Hill & Knowlton business. Gambit…
I’ve just been reading ARmadgeddon‘s thoughts about analysts and their sample sizes. It’s a useful example of some generic and specific weaknesses: both in vendors’ tendency to self-orientation (which can lead to rationalisations about whether analysts are good or bad according to whether they meet the vendors’ needs) and in their understanding of analysts. I’ll…
A number of the analysts I have been speaking to recently have been extremely busy (as have my colleagues and I, hence the dip in this blog’s frequency). There’s one story I hear over and over again: customized research is going through the roof. This makes me, and them, very curious: there a ‘real reason’…
I’m sure many of the readers of this blog know my colleague Louis Columbus. His book Getting Results from your Analyst Relations Strategies is an exceptionally useful introduction in analyst relations, and is now available on Amazon. As I understand it, the book has been an even bigger success than Louis hoped. In order to…