It’s good to see my friends Dennis Howlett launch Diginomica, David Vallente at Wikibon, Ray Wang at Constellation, Phil Fersht at Horses for Sources and others expand their firms, Michael Cote join 451 Research. These alums of Forrester, Aberdeen, ZDNet, Redmonk and their new homes show a fluid analyst marketplace.
Fresh models, fresh thinking.
And yet, most of their research continues in horizontal, somewhat mature IT markets. There is so much ground that is not covered. I observed in The New Technology Elite:
“Gartner, the technology research firm, covered the Amazon outage mentioned above extensively and has reports for its clients with titles such as “Protecting Sensitive Data in Amazon EC2 Deployments.”
But search the Gartner database for 3M and you get very few hits. In Chapter 18 we saw 3M says it has products in 46 different technology platforms. Gartner is the largest technology research firm. What gives?”
Enterprises cannot find much research in so many areas. So, where is a bank to find information on mobile banking apps from LaCaixa, some of the most successful in Europe or those from Standard Chartered with its Breeze apps in several Asian and African markets? So where is an auto insurance company to find information on the telematics in the Progressive Snapshot or Mapfre’s YCar initiatives? Where are auto companies to look for fuel cell, engine and other technologies they want to license versus develop?
The answer for many of them is to look for custom research boutiques or increasingly to build their own internal analysis groups. Enterprises have long had competitive intelligence and industry trends focused resources. The big difference these days is technology is an even more critical component in product, channel and supply chain areas.
Their products and services are increasingly mass customized. They expect their research to be similarly so.
(Cross-posted @ DealArchitect Full)
There are a number of other factors contributing to the decline in the traditional analyst market:
1. Basic tech research is accessible via the Internet via the press, associations and tech blogs so the large analyst groups are no longer relevant for discovering or interpreting basic trends
2. Major analysts have lost objectivity by catering too much to vendors, therefore have lost credibility as independent advisers
3.Most major analysts have lost the ability to see areas of disruptive change – often a focus on specialized categories and the use of metaphors from technology of the past
Vinnie,
Having access to the best research is the biggest competitive advantage many firms can have today. The more mainstream and packaged the “insight” is from the likes of Gartner, Forrester et al, the less of a competitive edge these firms can arm their clients with. Smart companies hire their own analysts, who have relationships with a handful of independent analysts / analyst firms with real, innovative ideas, and their own means on generating data views on business environments. End of the day, research is about bring together the finest minds, most innovative ideas in the industry and tying it to the most relevant, significant data… You no longer need to be in a billion-dollar behemoth to create that,
PF