The results of the IIAR Survey foreshadows several things about the future of the Big Analyst Groups:
- Being the most important/influential analyst group is not always as important as being relevant.
- The little guys (SMBs) are tired of being ignored or priced out of the market with the current subscriber model of the big analyst firms. Red Monk and their analysts are high on the lists probably because they follow their credo: "If you’re used to dealing with analyst firms that nickel and dime you, or ask you to pay for every insight, RedMonk will be a pleasant surprise. We share our learning freely, making our content available at no cost. We give back to variety of communities with both time and money, and always have time to help the little guy. When we say we’re different, we’re not kidding." Another company with the same principles: "One of the founding principles of Macehiter Ward-Dutton was that in order to reach our goal of being a leading advisory company in our space, we needed to be able to reach as many people as possible with our ideas and findings – and that meant finding ways to make our work as "open" as possible. Consequently we decided that all our core research reports should be made available, free-of-charge, to anyone who subscribes to our site.
I believe that this is the future of Analyst Groups and I think that the big guys need to start paying attention....
Your comments are welcome.
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4 comments:
Hi Nancy,
Sorry to leave a non-relevant comment on this post, but I could not find your email address anywhere.
My name is Carter Lusher and I am with SageCircle, which focuses on researching AR best practices and "analyzing the analysts."
I saw your comment on Technobabble and thought you would find the SageCircle blog interesting (www.sagecircle.wordpress.com).
Please drop me an email -- carter [at] sagecircle dot com -- as I would like to respond to your comment "I believe that the blogsphere and social media access will force the leading Analyst Groups to rethink their business models..."
Thanks Carter, I do check out your blog, very interesting. I put up my email on the blog now for easier communication. You can contact me at nancy@gk-biz.com
or we can have the discussion on line
“The little guys (SMBs) are tired of being ignored or priced out of the market with the current subscriber model of the big analyst firms…”
The reason why big analyst firms ignore SMBs is because with their current direct sales model, it is not profitable for major firms to go after the SMB market. In the past, a number of analyst firms put together special pricing and packaging for the SMB and set up telesales organizations to sell this research. The result was very little revenue, a lot of expense and a lot of headaches. The firms then folded the SMB telesales group into the large enterprise sales group so that they could give their major client account teams inside sales support for routine matters.
There is no downside for large analyst firms to ignore SMBs, because the penetration of their primary market (i.e., large enterprise with $1bn and above revenue) is low. For example, at its annual Financial Analyst Day, Gartner said of the 4,547 $1bn+ enterprises worldwide, it had only fully penetrated 405 (9%) and partially penetrated 938 (21%). This is after spending the last three years doubling the size of the direct sales force. So why go after SMBs when much more profitable opportunities are still available in large enterprises?
Well taken Carter but I still think that in order to present a valuable picture of the IT Industry-the SMBs need to be covered also and in the current situation it is hard for them to get access.
I also believe that event the big companies will push to change the subscription model at some point to analyst services that are more targeted.
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