Institute of Industry Analyst Relations (IIAR)
The IIAR is a not-for-profit organisation established to raise awareness of analyst relations and the value of industry analysts, promote best practice amongst analyst relations professionals, enhance communication between analyst firms and vendors, and offer opportunities for AR practitioners to network with their industry peers.
The Covid_19 and economic impact of lockdown is making 2020 truly unique, squeezing budgets for all companies. Most technology vendors hold contracts with the likes of Gartner, Forrester, IDC, Omdia, 451 and others ; and renewals for 2021 are predictably going to be tense.
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Hosted by Andrew Hsu (@andrew0hsu, LinkedIn) and Aniruddho Mukherjee (@aniruddho, LinkedIn), Sharyn (bio, @sharynleaver) will share Forrester’s big research themes for 2020, as well as how they are refreshing events. Plus, she’ll touch on analyst momentum and what it means for AR.
Continue Reading →London, Wednesday 27th November 2019. At the IIAR> we believe in taking a stance and recognising greatness when we see it -an approach we find more impactful than sprinkling awards to dozens of “winners”.
Today, at the IIAR> London Christmas Party kindly sponsored by HCL, we celebrated the top industry analysts and firms of the year. The IIAR> surveyed analyst relations professionals globally and from diverse industries, predictably casting a wide net on coverage areas. The evaluation used the IIAR SOSM methodology, to reflect the best practice promoted within the IIAR> looking at not only perceived sales impact, but also strategic insights, resonance in the media and ease of doing business with.
This year, analyst relations (AR) professionals have voted and provided clear insights both on the value they see from analysts, as well as how they perceive industry analyst firms’ value to them as clients. There were some interesting shifts in the 2019 results compared to prior years…read on to learn more!
Without further ado, the Analyst Relations community has spoken and the winners are….
Continue Reading →Fashionably late but always on point and by popular request here’s the IIAR Tragic Quadrant 2018, a representation of how Analyst Relations Professionals (AR Pros) have rated analyst firms in the 2018 survey we ran for the Analyst and Firm of the Year 2018.
For new readers here, the Tragic Quadrant is of course a pun on the infamous Gartner ‘Magic Quadrant’. We do not pretend this as an exhaustive analysis -nor is it a completely serious piece of research (the “Tragic” moniker is there as a reminiscence it should be taken with a pinch of salt). Nonetheless it is based on data and, as opposed to the Gartner Magic Quadrant, there are no magical and secretive weightings. As such, it is a good indication going back several years of the changes afoot in the industry analyst landscape and the judgement analyst relations professionals cast on industry research firms. And it provides actionable insights AR pros can use, something other surveys in this field often lack.
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Having just been through an onslaught of work related to the Forrester Wave™ evaluation on Zero Trust eXtended ecosystem platform providers, I think that it’s worthwhile to put some guidance out there that might help folks as they interact with analysts (well, me, mainly, but maybe it will help with others, as well). And a disclaimer: I don’t actively work with folks at other analyst firms, so take my humble advice here with a grain of salt; every analyst is a bit different, and each firm has its own way of doing things.
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This week, Forrester (Nasdaq: FORR) entered into a definitive agreement to acquire SiriusDecisions, for $245 million in cash. Larry Dignan at ZDNet did a great job breaking down the deal here. As with all acquisitions, many of the details have not been decided or announced yet, but as I long-time client of both firms, I wanted to share my perspective. Continue Reading →
Gartner has been forced to delay a Magic Quadrant report for at least six months due to the mass departure of pivotal analysts covering the enterprise data center space.
The delay followed news that analysts Dave Russell and Pushan Rinnen were leaving to join vendors. The duo were the mainstays of the Gartner team covering data backup. Their counterpart in the EMEA region, Robert Rhame, is also moving on.
Their timing was remarkable: Gartner was due to kick off research for its 2018 Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions last week. With all three authors choosing to leave Gartner, the firm had no credible option but to delay the start of the report: this is now on ice until 2019. Continue Reading →
Feeling the pinch in your negotiation with Forrester on your subscription contract?Do you feel comfortable in buying the multiple seats being pushed your way? Is Forrester covering the technology and business areas that are important for you? You’re not alone – many of your peers and IIAR members have commented (see the IIAR Tragic Quadrant 2017)
Forrester seems to force sell multiple seats, TEIs etc during renewals. Forrester analysts may be amongst the top IIAR Analyst of the Year 2017 but is Forrester seeing an exodus of top talent? As per the IIAR Analyst Firm of the Year 2017 survey, AR professionals mentioned that they felt a flip flop in Forrester’s focus on various key topics and verticals. Also the research subscription costs seem to be increasing at 10-20% yoy. They also felt that while Forrester had some great visualisation of data BUT insights were focused on niche topics like Customer Experience, Business Technology, Software and Marketing. Many Wave’s have not been renewed while others are renewed in an irregular cycle. Continue Reading →
The temperature may be dropping, but things have been heating up in the analyst community. Yes, it’s that time of year when we ask you to put the analysts themselves under the spotlight.
The 2017 IIAR Analyst of the Year Award nominations saw some hot competition, but inevitably there can be only one winner (well, actually we have three, but more about that shortly). Announced at the IIAR Christmas Party, kindly sponsored by Criteo, we celebrated the successes of some of the industry’s favourite thinkers and most serious strategists. Continue Reading →
After spending the last couple of years working for a vendor, Dr. Stefan Ried is to rejoin the ranks of the industry analyst community – arriving in April as Principal Analyst and Practice Lead for IoT at German analyst and consultancy outfit Crisp Research. 
Crisp, founded by former Experton analysts Dr Carlo Velten and Steve Janata, now boasts 20 analysts and consultants. Offering a hybrid mix of research and consulting, the firm is considered by AR professionals to be a rising star on the German analyst scene, thanks in part to its accessibility and willingness to work with vendors.
By the time he left Forrester at the end of 2014, where he was a VP and Principal Analyst, Stefan Ried had spent seven years covering cloud computing strategy – watching the industry grow from its early days. At Crisp, he’ll lead a new Internet of Things (IoT) practice.
Two years ago, in 2015, we produced the first IIAR Tragic Quadrant. It was met with much enthusiasm and comment, thus we have decided to repeat the exercise once again this year. Below we present the Tragic Quadrant for 2017. The Tragic Quadrant is compiled from data collected as part of the 2016 IIAR Analyst of the Year Survey, where, annually, we invite analyst relations professionals to rate individual industry analyst and the firms they work for. This year more than 100 different individual organisations responded to our survey. We were interested to see if we could do further analysis on the data that was collected.
In producing the Tragic Quadrant what we sought to do was to rank analyst firms according to three criteria. We chose these criteria because this is what the IIAR survey asks respondents to assess:
The IIAR is delighted to announce the winners of this year’s
AND THE WINNERS ARE…
Keep reading below for the IIAR Analyst of Year 2016, IIAR Global Analyst Firm of Year 2016, IIAR Independent Analyst of the Year 2016 and the best new entrants
Analyst relations pros voted for over 170 different individual analysts. Having run the survey over several years, it was striking to see the amount of new analysts that figured this year as compared to previous ones. This goes to show the dynamic nature of this space. There are now hundreds of so-called ‘upstarts’ firms, analysts continue to move between firms, and new analysts enter into the picture. Continue Reading →
Professor Neil Pollock looks at the role industry analysts play in creating today’s markets and asks: Who is shaping this dynamic digital world?…
The words digital economy conjure images of young, tech-savvy entrepreneurs breaking moulds in a world where technology is disruptive. But could the reality be much more mundane and mercantile? Continue Reading →
Today we ask our probing questions of Dan Bieler from Forrester. Dan (Linkedin, @DSBieler) was runner up in this years IIAR Analyst of the Year for 2015 as voted by analyst relations professionals
1. What are your coverage areas?
Key focus areas include customer engagement strategies, the mobile mind shift, and digital transformation. Continue Reading →
The IIAR is delighted to announce the winners of this year’s
AND THE WINNERS ARE…
Keep reading below for the IIAR Analyst of Year 2015, IIAR Global Analyst Firm of Year 2015, IIAR Independent Analyst of the Year 2015 and the best new entrants.
The IIAR analyst of the year 2015 was a close run thing this year round. Unlike previous years there was a lot more variety in the numbers and kinds of analysts chosen. Analyst relations professionals voted for over 150 different individual analysts, rating them along a wide range of criteria that included: their knowledge of the domain, does their research give actionable advice, is it novel and thought provoking etc; through to questions about their impact on technology adoption; and whether they were easy and flexible to work with from an analyst relations point of view. Continue Reading →
G2 Crowd Grid for Help desk
Good piece by Tony Bradley on TechSpective.net (via Rob Enderle and Stephen England) on whether crowdsourced analysis could displace Gartner, Forrester, IDC, etc.
I’ve been watching analysts for a long time and think this is fascinating -I was waiting for such a “JD Power of Tech” for a long time. The piece talks about Chaordix and Whale Path, and I’ve known for a while about G2 Crowd. Another well known so called Peer Review Site (PRS) is TrustRadius.
If they get it right, it will finally change the analyst business. Continue Reading →
Last year, as part of the 2014 IIAR Analyst of The Year Survey, we invited analyst relations professionals to rate their favourite industry analyst individuals and the firms they worked for. More than 60 individual organisations responded to our survey. We were interested to see if we could do further analysis on the data that was collected.
When we set out to do the IIAR Analyst of the Year (with Helen Chantry), we always had envisioned doing a Magic Quadrant of analyst firms. This year the survey provided us with further information which we have been able to breakdown and analyse to provide a more detailed understanding of how analyst relations professionals perceive the relevance, impact and reachability of industry analyst firms. We are not claiming that this is an exhaustive study. Rather it simply opens a new (slightly cheeky – hence the notion of “Tragic Quadrant”) window onto the analyst landscape, where we attempt to rank industry analyst firms by impact, relevance and ease to do business with. Continue Reading →
IIAR hosted Forrester’s new CMO, Victor Milligan (@vtmilligan, LinkedIn), at SapientNitro’s office in central London on April 30th. Victor joined Forrester in December to lead its global marketing organisation. He was in London last week for Forrester’s Marketing Leaders Forum, and later joined the IIAR members to discuss the company’s “Age of the Customer” strategy, go-to-market and key research themes for 2015. Benjamin Ensor (LinkedIn, @benjamin_ensor), VP & Research Director serving eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals also joined Victor during the session and took part in the Q&A. Continue Reading →
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