Bloor Research was established, grew and gained its reputation from product comparisons. If that’s your business, as an analyst company, it’s a pretty tough business. Here’s why:

1. Carrying out the work to compare a number of products that have the same or similar functions takes a long time and costs a lot of effort = money. (There is no inexpensive way to do it).
2. It’s front funded. Nobody pays you to do it, they only pay for the published report you produce. You will not sell large numbers of such a report.
3. There are only two sources of revenue; from IT users (who don’t appreciate high prices) and vendors who may buy reprints of parts of the report for collateral.
4. Unless you have a best seller (as Bloor Research had for a while with its database reports) you will not recover the costs and make a profit from IT users alone.
5. If you conclude that one or two specific vendors are ahead of the pack (and that’s usually the conclusion) you will only make significant revenue from sales to vendors if they happen to be fairly large companies. Small companies do not have significant budget.
6. If you don’t pick the right topics at the right time, you’ll lose money anyway, through lack of interest.
7. If you’re not scrupulously fair everyone despises you.

IT professionals read comparative reports because they are making purchasing decisions. The report doesn’t make the choice for them, but it will probably determine the short list. For a vendor, getting on the short list really matters. That’s why Gartner’s Magic quadrant is the money spinner that it is. It’s the industry’s leading short-list generator. All other short-list generators have lesser influence.

But from tales I’ve heard, the Quadrant is also a modern day Apple of Discord. If you don’t know the story of the discordant apple, here it is:

Zeus threw a party to celebrate the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, but when he sent out the email inviting everyone, he forgot to add the name of Eris (goddess of discord). It would have been OK if some idiot hadn’t forwarded a copy of the email invitation to Eris. So Eris turns up at the party uninvited and rolls a golden apple into the middle of the assembled guests, on which are written some Greek words, which mean, roughly translated, “for the best database”. Three database vendors claimed the apple: Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. Zeus decided that the apple should be awarded fairly and thus chose Gartner of the Magic Quadrant to make the award. Each of the database vendors offered gifts to Gartner in an attempt to win favor. Microsoft offered great power, IBM promised to make Gartner wise and Oracle suggested a night out with a racy blonde called Helen of Troy.

I hope you can see where I’m going with this. If you have powerful vendors all of which you have strong relationships with, they are all going to pressure you to get the result that they want. In the comparisons that Bloor Research did, we never let the vendors influence the process, we just published the results as a kind of fait accompli and if we got anything provably wrong we’d write addenda to the report. Unfortunately, Gartner cannot keep the vendors away from the process because they are all customers, and as such they have a right to some oversight of the process.

This makes it difficult to keep the comparison process balanced. And it’s difficult from both sides. I never yet met a vendor that didn’t think its products were wonderful. Defects are hard to admit. Some products are genuinely deficient yet the vendor manages to hide the deficiencies well. Small vendors are less able to influence the process than large vendors. And there’s always the suspicion that something untoward is happening, even when it isn’t. As a vendor you have no option but to try to influence the process, because the outcome can be damaging or very rewarding. But ultimately it’s the analyst company that wields all the power.

With great power comes great responsibility (as someone said to Spiderman, I believe).

For me at Bloor Research, it was the related revenues that came from the product comparison business that made it viable. We got quoted a great deal in the press. We got consultancy and presentation work and white paper work and the individual product reviews that weren’t part of comparative reports became a business line, because the brand had credibility. Bloor Research in the UK continues to do comparison work, but I’m not involved in it any more. I’m pursuing a very different business line. I’ll say more about it in a later posting in this series.

Note: This posting is one in a series of postings that deals with the topic of dealing with analysts. Click here for links to other postings in the series.