It has been good to see many of my friends – James and company at Redmonk, Ray and partners at Altimeter, Phil and friends at Horses for Sources, Scott and Doug of the Black Book series - do well with their “next-gen” analyst and market intelligence firms.
Gideon Gartner weighs in with his thoughts here. This blog loves disruptive vendors – and nothing more pleasing than to see the man who invented the industry look at reshaping it.
From the trends I researched in my upcoming book, The New Polymath, I have 3 “grand challenges” for these Davids as they go after the Goliaths:
- What are you doing to plan for the coming convergence of infotech, cleantech, biotech etc – way beyond infotech which of course, is a massive market to cover by itself?
- What we used to we call “user” organizations are often now technology vendors – various divisions of GE such as Healthcare, Transportation etc or have number of products which embed technology – the BMW iDrive, Nike + are profiled in the book. Who is going to step up and follow trends in their sectors?
- IT spend has become too “outsourced”- 80 to 90% of IT spend in most companies is now with tech and telecom vendors. And over 65% of that external spend is concentrated in the top 50 vendors. Surprise, surprise they are also the biggest revenue sources for the large analyst firms. How will you resist those same dollars – how do plan to be more independent and do what Gartner used to do when Gideon first started it?
