Research :: itbusiness.ca

The, umm, highlights?

Most enterprises customers, however, will likely take the same approach to market research as they have to establishing vendor partners: they'll winnow them down as much as possible, and in many cases will seek out those with the broadest portfolio of expertise. That doesn't mean there isn't any room for differentiation. I tend to see IDC, for example, as the best place to find overall market statistics on IT spending, including hardware and software sales. Gartner seems better at assessing industry trends like utility computing. Forrester, meanwhile, has some highly sophisticated practices around
specific vertical markets like finance. All of them offer everything, but each has subjects in which they stand out. More than most industries, analyst firms are truly a product of their employees.

Nurturing those employees and maintaining morale may be the most important element in the integration process at Gartner and Meta, which probably ruffled feathers when they said their merger
is intended to achieve "operational efficiencies" -- you don't have to be an analyst to know what that means. Even at IDC Canada, which so far has stayed away from acquisition activity, several long-standing analysts have fled, with no obvious replacements. These are people, after all, who are used to assessing the future. In the short-term, the forecast doesn't look good.

Well. I have no comment. None. Nada. Rien. Let's the facts stand. Yep. No idea what he could mean by "No obvious replacements." That's crazy talk. As Bill the Cat would say, "Cough. Oop Ack."