It’s good to see my friends Dennis Howlett launch Diginomica, David Vallente at Wikibon, Ray Wang at Constellation, Phil Fersht at Horses for Sources and others expand their firms, Michael Cote join 451 Research. These alums of Forrester, Aberdeen, ZDNet, Redmonk and their new homes show a fluid analyst marketplace.
Fresh models, fresh thinking.
And yet, most of their research continues in horizontal, somewhat mature IT markets. There is so much ground that is not covered. I observed in The New Technology Elite:
"Gartner, the technology research firm, covered the Amazon outage mentioned above extensively and has reports for its clients with titles such as “Protecting Sensitive Data in Amazon EC2 Deployments.”
But search the Gartner database for 3M and you get very few hits. In Chapter 18 we saw 3M says it has products in 46 different technology platforms. Gartner is the largest technology research firm. What gives?"
Enterprises cannot find much research in so many areas. So, where is a bank to find information on mobile banking apps from LaCaixa, some of the most successful in Europe or those from Standard Chartered with its Breeze apps in several Asian and African markets? So where is an auto insurance company to find information on the telematics in the Progressive Snapshot or Mapfre’s YCar initiatives? Where are auto companies to look for fuel cell, engine and other technologies they want to license versus develop?
The answer for many of them is to look for custom research boutiques or increasingly to build their own internal analysis groups. Enterprises have long had competitive intelligence and industry trends focused resources. The big difference these days is technology is an even more critical component in product, channel and supply chain areas.
Their products and services are increasingly mass customized. They expect their research to be similarly so.
