Following the successful IIAR Forums with Ovum, the firm has decided to hold regular calls for the AR community.
The first AR Community Call will be on Thursday 19th May 2011 at 0900 PDT / 1200 EDT / 1700 BST / 1800 CEST.It will be focused on updates about Ovum, its two research divisions, and upcoming events. Future calls will discuss research agendas, methodologies, procedures, the new Ombudsman function, and more. A big goal of these calls will be to answer your questions about Ovum and hear your suggestions for how we can work more effective with you and your companies.
RSVP to carter.lusher.at.ovum to receive the conference call info and presentation.
Agenda for Ovum’s inaugural AR Community Call
· Welcome & introduction – Carter Lusher (5 minutes)
· Ovum business update – Brett Azuma (10)
· Ovum Telecoms update – Richard Mahon (10)
· Ovum Technology update – Ian Charlesworth (10)
· Ovum Industry Congress update – Tim Jennings (5)
· Vendor Bill of Rights – Carter Lusher (5)
· Q&A – all, Carter Lusher moderate (15)
Question:
- How often do you think Ovum should carry those calls?
My take on this
- While Ovum is not the first mover, it is good to see another major IT Analysis firm following in Gartner’s footsteps and looking to work more collaboratively with AR pros, an important channel and prescriber for those firms. At last.
- Both Ovum and Gartner do genuinely ask for AR Pros’ input, often via the IIAR, to validate interests and define requirements for new products.
- Forrester’s AR Council on the other hand is closed (membership costs over $25k) and aims more at providing best practices for AR.
An interesting & welcome move on the part of Ovum.
What is interesting to watch is how the Analyst-Analyst Relations model is starting to move a bit closer to the Vendor-Financial Analyst and Vendor-Industry Analyst models. More structure, more focus and perhaps more control?
Hi Fred,
Not sure what brought you to that conclusion?
Hey Ludovic – Thanks for the question.
Historically, the relationship between Vendors and Financial Analysts has always been very structured – when they provide data/guidance, information about their operations, financials, business plans, etc.
Over the years, Vendors have adopted a similar approach to Industry Analysts – using the Financial model as somewhat of a template. Vendor Analyst Relations staff announce when their Analyst meetings/conferences will take place, what type of data they’re going to provide, who will be attending, etc.
In a way, this has provided some much-needed structure and helped to eliminate the requirement for continual ad-hoc queries between analysts and vendors (although there is always a new product announcement or a road-show that needs to take place on an as-needed basis, as well as the less formal “what do you think about xxxxxx?” interactions.
Now we see Analyst firms adopting a similar type of structure back to the Vendors, announcing what there research agendas will be for the coming year, what studies they are going to conduct, who the appropriate contact points are in particular areas, and what new coverages might be available. Like the other groups, they’ve realized the benefit of structuring their interactions (where practical) with Vendors and Analyst Relations professionals. This helps set guidance on both side of the equation.
This latest move by Ovum provides that exact type of basic structure – defining more closely the rules of engagement and how Ovum can best work with Analyst Relations professionals, including “updates about Ovum… upcoming events… research agendas… methodologies…. procedures… etc.”
I’m not saying this is a bad thing at all – if anything, it is nice to see some structure from all parties to balance out the sharing of information, expectations and establishing an equal footing for all parties to participate and collaboratively share data (one of the key points behind why Vendors regulate how/when/what they share with Financial and Industry Analysts).
Fred
Hi Fred,
Most vendors do Q updates and have programatic AR tactics already.
It is however quite true that IT analysis firms have been much more haphazard in updating IT vendors.
I guess this is something the IIAR can take credit for: we’ve been pestering all of them to come at our forums and pressed them with tough questions. It hasn’t always been comfortable but as it turns out it allowed both parties to build trust and share more, enabling analyst firms to gather input from AR practitioners and AR folks to be in a better position to pitch in analysts value internally.
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