At Thursday’s IIAR forum in London I presented results from a recent survey of vendor-side Analyst Relations managers. It asked how influential they rated certain analyst firms as being, and then whether they are rising of falling in influence.
Credit for the survey belongs to Jonny Bentwood and the others on the IIAR’s survey working party, who selected the firms listed.
The chart above shows the results, after the ‘falling’ percentage’ (for each analyst firm, the percentage of IIAR members surveyed who felt that its influence had fallen) has been subtracted from the rising percentage (thanks to Ludovic for working out how to embed the chart in this post).
For those in the know, the results are not too surprising: Forrester is the big riser, with IDC, Ovum and Yankee all doing well. The big losers are no surprise either: Bloor, Frost and Butler.
But what interests me is the trend line: generally, AR managers fell that the smaller and less influential firms are falling in influence, while the larger firms are generally rising in influence.
This really reinforces my opinion about the smaller analyst firms that trade on free research and internet profile. While their research is certainly worth reading, some vendors’ inflated expectations of 2006 now seem to be turning into sober judgement about where the real influence is building up.
hello. don’t really understand the graph, but one thing that does seem interesting, and you don’t talk to in your post is the really significant uptick in Freeform Dynamics’ influence. Any chance of some more analysis, or explanation of what this all means? I am glad your measure of influence evidently isn’t linked to vendor purchasing decisions, otherwise Christmas would be really depressing. Any information available on who, where, how many vendors were polled? A little transparency and or explanation of the methodology would be fab.
Hi James,
As a brand new firm rising from a very low base, I would be surprised if Freeform were much lower.
The data was an online survey of IIAR members. I don’t know which vendors particpated, but the membership covers 85% of the relevant firms.
The chart is pretty simple: the horizonal axis shows the average of the external influence of these firms, in the opinion of the respondants. the vertical axis shows the nett percentage of respoidants who feel the firms influence to be rising or falling.
Cheers,
Duncan.
James,
This is just a survey from our members and the repondent number is quite small (I think about 15-20).
So we should take it with a pinch of salt, and say it’s also much about how analysts communicate what they do to AR people (it’s an area for improvement for many).
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