Gartner and the interesting space of Technology advisory

Couple of weeks back, I had attended Gartner's Business Intelligence & Analytics conference at Mumbai, their recurring annual event in India. Overall, it was a very well organized conference with good thought leadership being served across the sessions, by their analysts.

All these years of my work experience, I have been bumping into Gartner - their collaterals in the form of whitepapers/webinars and the occasional analyst discussions and conferences. Their business and engagement model continues to amaze me. Quite like some of the successful consulting and research-advisory organizations, they have a rather evolved model of existence. Here, I take a 50,000 feet and possibly simplistic view of my understanding of their business model.

Gartner has a core team of expert analysts, some very good people with diverse & deep industry experience who do research and study trends. However, a bulk of their intelligence and industry reading comes through their consulting and advisory streams of business, wherein they engage IT sellers (technology vendors) and IT buyers (end clients of the vendors) to provide services on a variety of business accepts: 

• how should I position, package & sell technology products/services to my clients?
• how do I buy technology to solve my problems & how should I evaluate vendors?
• who are the top clients I should go after?
• who are the worthy vendors to evaluate?
• ..and so on

As you can see, they are at the centre, talking to both the sellers and buyers and that places them in a great vantage position - both for trend-prediction and match-making! With a market leadership, they are uniquely positioned to practically know whats brewing on the supply and the demand side - this completes their vision of what's happening in the industry. This gold-mine of information coupled with some smart analysts gives them the crystal-ball gazing abilities to call out evolving trends, atleast a couple of years in advance.

Now throw in a slew of products and solutions that are actually by-products of the above mentioned core engine - whitepapers, magic quadrants, hype cycles, analyst calls, webinars, global conferences, media products and what not. They brilliantly package and monetize this knowledge as suitably positioned information offerings, and have an army of people across rolls in their big org-structure who complete the picture (those that most industry watchers wouldn't even be aware of).

One might argue that there is a potential conflict of interest in this (seemingly self-feeding) cycle - IT sellers, in order to get positioned in the mainstream of the Gartner market picture would need to first get into this universe. This is invariably by signing up as a Gartner client, participating in their events and thereby gaining a mind-share with the all-important analysts. Though a successful emerging player could surely get noticed from the outside, there are doubts whether they can get featured in the mainstream collaterals (say, like the Magic Quadrant) if they choose to stay outside the ecosystem.

A potential counter-argument to the above could be the credibility and growing mind-share that Gartner enjoys in the Technology eocsystem, with IT buyers, sellers and all others on the sideline watching it. Perhaps, Gartner walks the fine line by balancing needs/commitments to their clients with an unbiased market picture portrayal to all others. Perhaps, they manage all this too well. 

Nevertheless they are in an interesting position and doing some exciting stuff in the technology industry. Definitely, a space to continue watching.