Thinking outside the Magic Quadrant

First an apology, I could have it titled this post as well with the Forrester Wave or the IDC MarketScape.

Next a mea culpa, I unleashed a few MQs during my tenure at Gartner in the 90s. However, in the years since I have become much more aware of the disconnect between tech buyers and vendors about the value of such tools.

When I was at Gartner, its revenues came largely from buyers. In the run up to Y2K, my colleagues and I did thousands of calls with buyers actively making ERP decisions. Coming up with the MQs - the leaders, challengers - was pretty easy with that market driven data. We did not have a composite win/loss analysis but we could make some pretty educated guesses about market share and momentum.

In today’s much more fragmented IT marketplace, especially since analyst revenues have become more vendor centric it must be so much more difficult. Analysts have to poll vendors for what we used to gather from market signals. You hear vendors whisper in frustration at how much effort it requires on their part.

The bigger issue is how buyers use MQs or Waves. It is just the tip of a spear. It is used to come up with a short list of vendors to evaluate. Detailed RFPs, demos, site visits, reference calls, lengthy negotiations are far more influential in the final decision. Nearly 15 years ago, I wrote about the ‘1,000 points of influence’. With growth of social media, the influence points have only grown. In composite, they help buyers derive their personalized "Interactive MQ".

Also, once they have decided on a vendor, most buyers don’t pay much attention to that MQ category till their next purchase - that could be a couple of decades. Oh, if a vendor drops precipitously from the Leader to the Niche quadrant, they would be concerned, but such moves tend to be glacial.

Vendors, in contrast, get their microscopes out to measure how much they moved from one MQ to the next. It’s fodder for press releases. I especially enjoy the Triple Crown announcements. “We are a leader in Analyst A, B and C’s tools.” I want to ask them - and how many buyer steps above did that eliminate?

MQs and similar tools also tend to reinforce silos in analyst firms. That can drive what I have described as Addressable Market Myopia 

There is a whole community of very committed Analyst Relations folks at vendors. Ignoring MQs would be suicidal, but does so much talent need to be invested every year on the MQ/MarketScape process?

Some of them will ask me what would you do differently. I am happy to help them think outside the box - ok, the square - in how to directly help their sales colleagues in their pursuits. How to help their companies think about and present their products differently and much more creatively. How to look around the corner - the analyst intermediary.  

No press release needed.