Situation Room — From the Ivory Tower in Boston (or Stamford, CT)
We have received dozens of client inquiry calls from concerned parties looking for advice on how to negotiate their 2010 agreements with Gartner and AMR Research. Now that the two firms will be coming together under the Gartner umbrella, there are dozens of clients who remain uncertain as to the best course of action. While our firm makes a lot of money in our consulting practice advising companies on just such situations (trust us; there is separation between church and state here, hahahaha), we need to share just enough insight in paid briefs like this to keep our research clients happy. That is what we will try to do today.
Recommendation: Vendors, Tread Lightly
We have two sets of recommendations for companies considering renewing their 2010 agreements with Gartner and AMR Research. Our recommendation for vendors is as follows:
Even though the current situation might present an opportunity to give the analyst firms a feel-good kick in the you-know-what from a budgeting perspective, halving your combined Gartner/AMR spend next year, we recommend against this course of action. Why? While analyst firms claim to maintain walls between sales and research, we intercepted a double-secret memorandum in this case, which suggests that “analysts of XXXX firm are to find nefarious ways of damaging the credibility of any vendor who reduces its combined budgets … such activity could take the form of quadrant placements without full explanation, phone recommendations to practitioners informed by guesses rather than fact, and research briefs that do not fully disclose who are clients and who are not.” Even though these practices are par for the course today, we are encouraging our vendor clients to be especially wary given the sensitivities around this situation. Pay the money to be safe…
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