Opinions are like fingerprints, everyone has one.
Not all of us get paid to offer our opinions, and even fewer of us manage to make a business out of selling our opinions. This particular skill is unique to analysts, the self-proclaimed experts on everything from Aardvark Extinction to Zebra Stripe Groupings. If you have enough money and you pay the right analysts you can be reported as the market leader in Aardvark Extinction if you so wish.
I’ve had personal experience with both sides of the analyst fence. I worked for Oracle for some time as a product manager. We had to maintain relationships with analysts as part of the process of our product release strategy. The people we worked with were all very nice (we were paying them) and asked lots of questions about how things worked, why they were designed the way they were etc. in their quest to ascertain where to place us on their scale but I never worked with one who had installed and used our product. Not one! Don’t you think that’s a bit weird? Like a motoring journalist who tells you that your best choice for your mid-life crisis sportscar is a Trabant. Wouldn’t you think that it was a bit strange that they placed a Trabant higher on their recommendation scale than other well-known makes from Maranello or Stuttgart? Wouldn’t you be just a little suspicious that they’d more than likely been in receipt of a persuading fee to be telling you that a plastic car from a communist economy was more worthy of your mid-life cash?
This is exactly what happens in the world of IT where analysts consistently provide opinions to IT decision-makers that decide the destiny of millions (sometimes billions) of dollars/euros/pounds for specific projects.
I get it, if you’re a senior decision maker, your time is precious and having access to guiding opinions on matters you may not personally have experience with, is a comforting safety net. However, do you not owe it to your own integrity, your colleagues, investors and business partners to at least try to ensure that you make decisions armed with all pertinent facts and mitigating factors?
We regularly encounter executives who blindly refer to analyst opinion when considering who to entrust their reputation and budget to in the murky world of audit defence and SAM.
In the event of notification of a formal audit, would you choose to partner with an organisation that can point to a history of audit defence that goes back to 2002, and runs to the tune of hundreds of engagements and hundreds of millions of dollars in cost avoidance and mitigation? Or would you choose an organisation that is recommended to you by an analyst (because that firm pays the analyst) even though that firm is not based in your home country and has no record of operation in that country and no technical experience with the products in question? Would you still choose the analyst recommended firm when your own staff are querying that choice and recommending the local experts you already have a relationship with?
This exact situation occurred to me last month, it is disappointing and frustrating when you work so hard to build what you think is a fruitful relationship where you go out of your way to help in situations where the quid-pro-quo is questionable, and then an ample opportunity comes in and the proverbial rug is whisked away from your feet when a C-level exec gets involved and chooses to listen to an analyst over their own staff, or even facts.
Yes, that’s business, and had the opportunity gone our way, would I be writing this? Possibly not, but it definitely was the forefront of my mind when reading this article.
If you get 10 minutes, I can thoroughly recommend reading this article. Brightwork has a history of writing thought-provoking pieces on the world of enterprise IT and the ecosystems that exist within this world.
The author of the Brightwork piece applies accepted data science techniques to analyse some published Gartner magic quadrants and comes to some (probably not) surprising conclusions.
For example, the author states that, in their opinion
“Gartner has virtually no first-hand experience in the technologies that they evaluate and get most of their information from speaking with executives at buyers or executives at vendors and consulting firms.”
My experiences when I was at Oracle would back up this opinion and now in the SAM world, we see analysts recommending the use of SAM tools when there is an avalanche of information abounding that SAM tools are not the panacea they profess to be.
In summation within their piece the Brightwork author further states
“Gartner serves to direct IT spending to the most expensive solutions as these are the companies that can afford to pay Gartner the most money.”
Once again, through bitter personal experience, I’d be inclined to agree with this opinion.
Bottom line, paying analysts merely maintain a status quo that benefits those willing to compromise their morals and disenfranchises those who cannot afford to play the game or whose morals are strong. This is the same model that exists in politics where those with the most money pay lobbyists to get what they want, and we all know how moral and upstanding politicians are, right?
Making a key decision? You owe it to your staff, your customers, your investors and most importantly, to yourself to question the source of any guidance, especially if it comes from an analyst. In the long run, your investment in a supplier who isn’t paying analyst bills but instead investing it in their people and tools will repay you as you are making an investment in innovation.
Note this is a personal opinion piece, nothing more, nothing less.
Contact me if you want to talk about innovative SAM and audit defence solutions delivered by passionate experts who like to play fair.
About the Author
Jason Pepper is the Head of SAM Practice here at Version 1.
