I just read Matt Asay’s article “Time to upgrade upgrade open source perceptions of Gartner” where he gives Gartner credit for finally getting open source. His point is that Gartner has stopped steadfastly arguing that open source’s impact was negligible. On that point, I have to agree. Gartner has jumped onto the open source bandwagon just as it was accelerating out of Gartner’s reach. But what does that really mean? It means that Gartner’s readership (predominantly technology vendors) have forced Gartner to cover a market segment that they are no longer able to ignore. It also means that some of the open core software vendors have gotten big enough that they now represent a decent market for Gartner reports and services.
From a technology customer’s perspective, the value of Gartner’s (and most of the other major analysts, for that matter) opinion is pretty much the same. Main stream technology analysts focus on the business of technology (market share/cap/potential) — not the design or suitability of the products. Market analysts don’t work with the technology. They don’t talk to users or developers. Half of the people they talk to are CIOs who couldn’t identify the user interface of the software they are discussing.
So, if you are a software company or an investor trying to figure out where to spend your money, Gartner’s reports just got a little bit more useful. If you are in the market to buy technology, Gartner won’t help you understand your requirements and what product is the best fit for your organization.
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- Great Dialog About Open Source Business My colleague Stephen Walli and Matt Asay from Alfresco had...
Listening to Gartner now is like reading the newspaper, yesterday’s news. If you want to understand what’s happening and why open source and Free really work for business I would tell you to listen to the audio book
Free:The Future of a Radical Price available at http://www.hyperionbooks.com/free
Matt is right; Gartner is doing a much better job covering the OS world. But on some of the other points you make I disagree: most of Gartner’s subscribers are not vendors, but enterprise buyers of technology; Gartner have always covered OS; and their focus is very much on the suitability of technology for the buyer, not just the market share dynamics.
You are right that, by volume, most of Gartner’s subscribers are buyers but that does not mean that Gartner targets them as an audience or that the research helps them. The problem with Gartner is that, even when the research is unbiased, it is too abstract to be actionable and support technology decisions. A technology buyer should focus on his specific requirements, not the future of technology markets as Gartner sees it. Case in point, in 2002 I lead a website development project for another large technology research firm and they insisted that their analysts drive the architectural choices. Their recommendation was BroadVision as an application server and NorthernLight for search. We were able to override the BroadVision recommendation but they won on NorthernLight. As a result we had to do all these engineering gymnastics to do something as simple as return a paginated search result of research of research that the visitor bought subscriptions for.
Gartner may be useful for high level strategy (like should we encourage staff to maintain internal blogs for knowledge sharing? or should we pay attention to Twitter?) but not for technology platform selection guidance.