Analysts getting a bad press - how can they do better? -

It seems to be a bad summer for analyst companies in several sectors: here’s Forrester getting a kicking from Digital Clarity Group about their Wave report on Digital Experience Delivery Platforms (my first challenge was understanding what on earth those are, but I think it’s a new shiny name for web content management), Nuix putting the boot into Gartner about their eDiscovery Magic Quadrant, and Stephen Few jumping up and down in hobnail boots on both analyst firms about Business Intelligence (insert your own joke here), complete with a not particularly enlightening reply from Forrester themselves.

Miles Kehoe has already taken a look at Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report on our own Enterprise Search sector. I’ve written before on how I don’t think open source solutions are particularly well treated by the large analyst firms, as they often focus on vendors only. The world has somewhat changed though and five of the seventeen vendors mentioned are using a base of open source technology, so at least some of this major part of the market is covered.

However the problem remains that the MQ ignores a great deal of the enterprise search sector: it doesn’t cover Sharepoint with its FAST-derived search facility, Oracle’s Endeca (which apparently is now no longer available as a standalone product, a surprise to me), Funnelback (which is again incorrectly labelled as open source – it’s the Squiz CMS software that’s open source, not the search engine they bought) or the rising star of Elasticsearch. If you were new to the sector you might conclude that none of these options are available to you. Gartner itself says “This Magic Quadrant introduces search managers and information architects in end-user organizations to the range of enterprise search vendors they can choose from” – but this range is severely and artificially restricted.

Let’s hope that the analyst firms take note of some of this bad press – perhaps it’s time to change approach, be more open about biases and methodologies, and stop producing hugely oversimplified diagrams to characterise complex and deep business sectors.