The IIAR is delighted to announce the winners of this year’s IIAR Analyst of the Year and Analyst Firm of the Year
AND THE WINNERS ARE…
Tag Archives | Forrester
IIAR Forum – Forrester’s Latest Strategy
It was with eager anticipation that IIAR members awaited Forrester’s Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer, Tom Pohlmann, to update delegates on Forrester’s strategy at both a regional and global level. The session at the IIAR London Forum did not disappoint.
In an open and honest exchange there was recognition of earlier strategies continuing but with some new developments that are of note to AR professionals.
Role-based strategy: Amalgamating with marketing
The role-based strategy will continue, some may say unfortunately!, but this will now be expanded to focus more on the front office, e.g. marketing, sales enablement and services, and their connection to traditional IT functions. Tom acknowledged that the marketing segment has been one of the fastest growing areas of the business apportioning more than a third of global revenues and so it is an inevitable growth area for the company. This also means Forrester are hiring with the skew towards marketing and strategy analysts versus purely technology analysts. This is a continuation of the past but what seems to be new is the direction they are taking to more closely align marketing and business technology teams, which will be reflected in client interactions and research material. Forrester see their USP as connecting the front office with technology.
European growth: Work in progress Continue Reading →
[Guest Post] A Member’s View: Forrester’s marketing pitch at the IIAR London Forum
By: Ludovic Leforestier
Dispatches from last week’s IIAR London Forum – A member’s personal perspective on Forrester’s Presentation at the IIAR London Forum. You can view the official IIAR report here.
After a fascinating presentation from Neil Pollock (see his blog post here [Guest Post] Why IT Vendors Should Take Industry Analysts (More) Seriously), Forrester came “en force” to give IIAR members an update on the company strategy. Tom Pohlmann (@tpohlmann, LinkedIn), Forrester’s CMSO patiently presented and answered IIAR members’ questions. My take on this is that the firm is on a journey to deliver strategic research advice up the food chain and deliver at a strategic level – they’ve started with IT managers, then moved on to CMO’s in the past and are trying to better penetrate the rest of the C-suite. Forrester disagrees with this statement. Continue Reading →
IIAR Discussion Group: Running Great Analyst Events on 16 August, 4pm BST / 11am ET
If you’re in the thick of preparations for an upcoming analyst event, or thinking of holding an event next year, this discussion is for you!
We have an extremely distinguished line-up of four great panellists for our next panel discussion on Thursday 16th August, 4-5pm BST / 11-12pm ET / 8-9am PT all about running successful analyst events. Whether you’ve run events in the past or are embarking on one for the first time, this call will be invaluable, discussing top tips from AR pros in the field as well as market leading analysts from Gartner and Forrester. This is a really great opportunity to glean some insights that will make you an AR champion and have your executives raving. Continue Reading →
IIAR APJ Forum: Forrester continues to expand its operations in Asia/Pacific
By: Dave Noble, IIAR Board Member & APJ Chapter Lead
Forrester VP Dane Anderson (left) and senior analyst Tim Sheedy at last week’s APJ Forum
Just over 12 months since acquiring Asia/Pacific firm Springboard Research, Forrester Research continues to invest in the region with a view to significantly increasing its market share, particularly in the end-user space.
Speaking at the IIAR’s APJ Forum in Sydney last week, Forrester vice president & AP region manager, Dane Anderson, said that based on Q2 sales technology vendors now represented less than 50 per cent of the firm’s revenues in the region and that end-users would continue to be a major focus.
“We want to aggressively build out our end-user business… we can serve our vendor clients better by understanding their (end-user) clients more completely,” he said. Continue Reading →
Forrester Research Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer to Speak at IIAR UK Forum
Our next IIAR Forum in London is going to be a very special one!
We have two fantastic speakers lined up and are extremely privileged to be able to host such distinguished guests in what we believe will be a truly valuable Forum for all those in the AR profession.
Please mark your diaries: Thursday 27th September, 4-6:30pm BST
Forrester Research Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer, Tom Pohlmann will be making his way from the US especially to meet with IIAR
members and discuss Forrester Research’s plans and strategy. This is a unique opportunity to speak with and hear from one of the most influential executives within Forrester Research and have your questions answered directly on the future of the company and why you should continue your investment as a client / prospect.
In addition to that we have Dr. Neil Pollock, Reader in Information Systems from the University of Edinburgh School of Business who has carried out the first ever academic study of industry analysts and the kinds of influence they wield on IT decision makers and IT vendors. His talk will report on some of the top line findings of this research. Continue Reading →
IIAR APJ Forum – Forrester APJ Update with Dane Anderson, VP Forrester
The next IIAR APJ Forum will be held on Wednesday 25th July at 4pm Sydney / 2pm Singapore / 11:30am India at Forrester’s offices in Sydney with webex facilities for those who wish to dial in.
Dane Anderson (VP – Research Director and Region Manager, Forrester) has kindly agreed to provide IIAR members with a detailed update on where Forrester is at in the Asia-Pacific/Japan (APJ) region and an update 12 months after the Springboard acquisition. This will very much be a members-led discussion and so this event provides a great opportunity to ask questions that affect your business.
Following the event there will be informal networking with AR peers and the broader analyst community at the Cargo Bar, Darling Harbour from 5:30pm Sydney time onwards.
This session is free for IIAR members. Non-members can pay $A25 to attend via conference call or $A100 to attend in person. Please contact me to secure your place and receive further details or to request an invoice for payment. The event will be hosted by Dave Noble, IIAR Board Member.
Paris report: oh là là cinq Forrester forums
Forrester ran this week its annual landmark European conference, or rather EMEA Forums. Indeed this year, the EMEA IT Forum was dismembered into five separate, co-located role-based events: Infrastructure & Operations, CIO, Security, Sourcing & Vendor Management (IT services in plain English) and Enterprise Architecture.
Those five events were marketed separately but they were in fact more like parallel tracks in a larger conference –without a main session, meaning many attendees did not get to hear from CEO, George Colony with regard to his views on the markets and emerging trends.
From an AR standpoint, this divide and conquer audiences strategy made scheduling one to ones somewhat tricky as attendees could only book meetings in advance for the “event” they were registered for (although Forrester subsequently commented this should not have happened). Continue Reading →
IIAR Café at Forrester Forums – 19 June in Paris
The IIAR will be hosting an informal networking session at the Forrester Forums during the evening of Tuesday 19th June in Paris. It’s a chance to unwind, discuss the day’s events with AR colleagues and talk about the latest activities and upcoming events within the IIAR. Hosting the Cafe will be Ludovic Leforestier (@lludovic) from BearingPoint and former IIAR Board member as well as Ed Capps from AR Insights.
For further details of the event and to register your interest please email me.
The hype cycle of Vendor Briefing Requests
Have you ever submitted a vendor briefing request? For those of you who have, and for those who have yet to experience this joy, here’s a humorous and (perhaps only slightly) exaggerated description of the process and some insights into why AR people always seem to struggle with it.
What’s clear is that analysts and executives alike don’t know or care how complicated the process is and don’t appreciate AR folks sometimes …. especially when it goes wrong. I’m sure we all have stories of briefings going wrong before they have even started – because the dial-ins don’t work, or there’s a troublesome time-zone challenge, or because the IP-based telephone network decides to crash.
Continue Reading →
[GUEST POST] An Insider’s Guide to Technology Analysts by Cormac Foster
Thanks a lot to ReadWriteWeb to allow reposting of this excellent entry by By Cormac Foster (LinkedIn, @cormacfoster).
The original post can be found here.
Gartner. Forrester. IDC. And lots of smaller fish, too. You can’t read a tech-industy news story, attend a conference or listen to a sales pitch without someone quoting an industry analyst. For tech companies, analysts are big news and big business, promising to help with transformation, monetization and a slew of other things ending in “-ation.”
But what do technology industry analysts really do? And how do you find the one that’s right for your company’s needs. Let me try to explain, from the inside. You see, from 1999 through 2001, I was an analyst at Jupiter Research, now part of Forrester Research.
Gartner gets the IDEAs from Forrester
It seems Gene took Gartner‘s shopping trolley on a jumbo to Oz this week and a page from George‘s book: the research firm just announced it was buying Ideas International [ASX:IDE] was established in 1981 as a consultancy service and since 1986 has provided its special brand of research to IT users and vendors. This acquisition is still subject to regulatory and other approvals.
This move has a strong reminiscence from Forrester’s purchase of Springboard last year (read our post:Forrester joins the feeding frenzy, buys Springboard)
Has time come for a disruptive analyst firm?
Wine connoisseurs take as much pleasure talking about drink than savouring it…. so let me indulge you into an analogy between research firms and some of my favourites.
As with fine wines and corporate buying trends, so goes analyst firms. The shift of power from IT to Business signifies a move from Wine to Champagne….
Ray (@rwang0, LinkedIn, blog) writes here about the latest IIAR Forum London and he’s got a few interesting points.
- Client base and research approach
- There’s a wine analogy there: Gartner is like a Bordeaux (predictable blends) and Forrester is more like a Burgundy (more variable but sometimes great).
- Gartner tends to sell to a mature IT audience, which is where most of the IT budget is. Its research output thus tends to be more conservative, after all most people don’t really want to experiment the at bleeding edge. As a result, it’s unlikely you’ll be surprised by a genial piece of research.
- Forrester does this as well, but because (or thanks to) its marketing research, also cater for that role and its research style tends to be more adventurous (the Giga legacy probably) even if its coverage quality and quality is less constant.
- And IDC sells to IT vendors mostly, a little to industry leaders (has to be a Côtes du Rhône, with elements of both depending on the individual analyst for opinion whilst the trackers are more constant –Shiraz is a bit like Marmite, it’s “love it or hate it”).
- The point there is that your client base is your legacy, and unless you’re Steve Jobs or Henry Ford, most fail to break away from ‘building a faster horse’. In IT research aspects, it translates into “IT must align with business” (yawn). Analysts have been preaching this for the last 15 years, and it seems the issue hasn’t gone away. Some part of the IT will be run as a utility (a better word than cloud, and in the same bucket than facilities and real estate) whilst the innovative stuff will be done by the business. IT is the business, the rest is a commodity (this doesn’t mean that everyone knows how to provision a commodity efficiently).
- Another interesting aspect is that because they sell to a mature audience, they will confronted to a bit of an issue when baby-boomers will (finally) retire in the coming 5 years and be replaced by Gen-X and Gen-Y who have no appetite for academic style research. [Note: there’s a discussion here with some fellow IIAR members on whether the Gartner client base is that, er, experienced. What do you think?]
Indeed Gartner is trying (again) to grow its SMB user base, but unless they radically change the way research is written, they will probably fail again. Constellation has probably a good card to play there by targeting smaller, innovative companies –even though up to 2/3 won’t make it into adult age.
- On “design point”, Constellation is pitching itself right in the “future of work” trend.
- For analysts, time will tell if it’s ensuring, but trying to retain them by force (check this letter from Forrester’s CEO George Colony on non-compete) isn’t going to build a star-stable. Indeed, whilst Gartner seems to be doing a good job at keeping its best analyst, but it’d be curious to see how the average experience of Forrester analysts has evolved over time. There seem to be more researchers who graduated as analysts than analysts who came from a previous career. That in itself isn’t a sole predictor for insight, though it helps, but one would think that there’s a cost aspect (it’s the Forrester vs. the Giga models).
- For users, I’d venture out to say it’s again like Marmite. For establish companies, dealing with established brands having real offices offices is probably deemed ‘safer’. For Constellation’s target customers, meeting in a Stabucks probably isn’t a problem. James Governor (@monkchips, blog) seems to have found out that being unconventional actually helps with his specific audience: developpers.
- On analyst access
- In terms of business model, Ray is indeed accessible which is quite refreshing compared to other analysts who for instance reduce briefing slots to 30mn. Whether that can be scaled without administering Modafinil to the rest remains to be seen.
- For end users, it would be a net-gain if the processes to ensure a constant user experience as Constellation grows in size work effectively.
- On research approach
- Legacy firms underplay the community aspect indeed but let’s not forget that Gartner is quite a large community in itself.
- From an end-user aspect, one could expect more innovative research.
- On sales
- IMHO it’s where I’ll be watching Constellation as converting from a consulting model to a RAS one isn’t that straightforward. So far they seem to be on the right track though.
Bottom line:
- Gaining enough scale to gain a sufficient end-user base is challenging for mid-sized firms but Constellation seem to be making all the right noises.
- Establish firms need to break away from their traditional user base to reinvent themselves before baby-boomers retire.
Ludovic Leforestier (LinkedIn, @lludovic)
See also Duncan’s post on the IIAR Forum with Constellation:
And Ray Wang’s own post:
More stars move into the Constellation
The IIAR’s UK chapter had a highly interactive discussion on March 14 thanks to the presence of Constellation Research‘s R “Ray” Wang (@rwang0) and three star analysts who’ve joined his firm as vice-presidents and principal analysts: Alea Fairchild (@afairch), Charles Brett (@charlesbrett) and Paul Papadimitriou (@papadimitriou).
The meeting at the IIAR London Forum, organised by Simon Levin in the plush Bell Pottinger, HQ heard a pointed discussion on the development of new value propositions in the analyst industry, reflected by the successful growth of Constellation, which only launched in 2010. Continue Reading →
Social media for the APJ AR pro
IIAR Asia-Pacific recently held a virtual forum to discuss social media. It was a great opportunity to talk more about one of the current hot topics in the AR industry and how it relates to the local APJ markets.
Discussion centred on different uses of varying social media channels leading to the conclusion that social media represents an extension to personal communication preferences. For Steven Noble, (Senior Analyst / Forrester), social media is a normal part of his working life and used through the development of a research paper. At each step social media plays its part; awareness gathering, development of research topic ideas, information gathering, surveying, publishing, promotion. Continue Reading →
And the IIAR Analyst of the Year 2011 is…
For the fourth year running, AR professionals have been polled to select the analyst and firms they consider the best best for thought leadership, ease to do business with, influence and value for money.
The IIAR is delighted to announce that this year’s IIAR Analyst of the Year 2011 goes to…
[REBLOG] How to read an analyst report?
Unfortunately we can’t reblog this, read the original report and some quotes below. The advice it gets can be summed up as follows.
- Picking a Firm
- What kind of analyst firm is it? According to Ludovic Leforestier of IIAR, the Institute of Industry Analyst Relations, an industry group of analyst relations (AR) professionals, there are three major types of analyst firms:
- The big three are Gartner (750 analysts and about $1 billion in revenue), IDC (1,200 analysts), and Forrester (300 analysts and about $300 million in revenue).
- Midsize niches, typically with five to ten analysts, are often focused on a particular area, such as ESG for storage or Evans Data for software development trends.
- Independents are a diverse category.
- Does the analyst take vendors for clients
- “Is the report commissioned by a vendor or is it written prospectively?” asks Leforestier. “This is an important point: Although good AR people will avoid pay-to-play to get endorsements, some are known as analysts for hire. Check the research library on the analyst website and you’ll clearly see some are always writing positively about one vendor.”
- Is the report pay-to-play?
- Where does the analyst firm get its information and analysts?
- What type of deliverable is it?
Analyst firms: rock star bands or record label dinosaurs?
A recent contract renewal conversation with an IT analyst firm rep got me wondering how record companies ended up suing their best adopters and whether the end is nigh for them. Both music and research live on IP, and there are many similarities, though we’ll only explore the consumption and value aspects in this post.
Many have a better informed opinion than myself on the music industry but I tend to agree with Jon: there’s been a lack of innovation. The CD was a more practical format but quality wasn’t one hundred times better. I have yet to be immersed in a true quadriphonic experience, and so on. Sure thing, the mp3 format is much more practical but it would be far fetched to claim to say that the industry embraced it willingly. Actually, I would go as far as to say iTunes is Steve Job’s best ‘invention’, that was to get record labels to licence their music on it. In addition to the lack of technical innovation, there isn’t a great deal clarity in the offerings. Good new sounds maybe surfacing all the time however most are ephemeral. I can’t think of many that indeed built a following matching that of the 60ies and 70ies (and even 80ies) household names. That last point is important, as building up a loyal consumer base is much more profitable than rotating new products. Continue Reading →
IIAR Asia/Pacific Virtual Forum: Value of Social Media to APJ AR
The IIAR will be holding is first Virtual Forum in Asia/Pacific with a guest panel to discuss:
What’s the value of social media to Asia/Pacific AR professionals?
- Steven Noble – Senior Analyst (eBusiness & Channel Strategy), Forrester
- Mandi Bateson – Director, Digital, Hill & Knowlton
- Dave Noble – Asia/Pacific Chapter Lead, IIAR (moderator) Continue Reading →
IIAR North American Forum Call
The third in our series of IIAR US virtual meetings will be taking place on Wednesday August 24th at 4-4:45pm PT / 7-7:45pm ET. It’s a chance to learn more about the Springboard acquisition by Forrester and their research coverage in the Asia-Pacific region. Continue Reading →
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