The analyst industry (if you can call it that) is dominated by a big 900lb gorilla that goes by the name of Gartner. It’s been that way as long as I can remember and it’s likely it will remain that way - in some form - for quite a while.

Envisage, if you like, that Gartner is managed very badly for a number of years and that some upcoming analyst company gains sufficient respect to be “thought of” as the new dominant one. If it has any sense it will tear up the Magic Quadrant and replace it with the “Mystical Metric” or something similar which becomes the “0 to 60″ figure that every vendor and his dog puts on slide 15 of their customer Powerpoint (if it’s favorable). Next it will arrange two annual conferences in the US and EMEA to give the customers a few days out and to reel in a whole truck-load of cash. What you will have is simply Gartner 2.0 (where 2.0 has nothing to do with social networks, Ajax and the web - pul-ease). What I’m saying is that a “Gartner” of some kind is probably inevitable.

Aside from managing those healthy business streams and others that are dependent on them, Gartner fulfills the important role of giving “names to all the animals”, by which I mean, inventing new terms to describe new technology that emerges and “is worthy ” of its own quadrant. I’ve heard many stories positive and negative about Gartner, but I must say in its defense that it acquits its role as “chief taxonomy creator and guardian of the IT lexicon” reasonably well. As far as I know it doesn’t invent trivial categories for the purpose of boosting revenue (more quadrants = more money) and you cannot bribe Gartner into creating a new category on your behalf. Gartner decides on its own.

Also, to give Gartner its due, it has some very good analysts, it’s run reasonably well and it’s not an easy company to run. In the business sense, I see it as stuck between a rock and a hard place. It cannot grow much on the analyst side because it covers pretty much everything. Its analyst side can only grow meaningfully if technology itself expands. It could move into other industries I guess, like bio-medicine, say, but only if there were a market there. It cannot go into financial analysis because that belongs to the banks and investment houses. So it’s stuck with developing a consultancy arm, which is a balancing act. Gartner can never become a lucrative Systems Integrator (SI) because that business not only involves getting into bed with vendors and but also having long term relationships. Analysts can’t do that and claim impartiality.

Yet Gartner is, for quite a while at least, very secure. What works, works. For professionals who make technology decisions and recommendations, it provides a highly useful information service that strongly influences the creation of many purchasing short-lists, and which allows the user to defend their decisions by referring to Gartners technology reviews. Nearly all analyst brands have value in that way, but Gartner’s brand has by far the highest value.

For vendors this means that, no matter whether you love or hate Gartner, you have to accommodate the company if analysts have or might have any influence on your business. You have to give unto Ceasar that which is Ceasar’s.

Note however, that many open source businesses and many web startups (like Facebook for example) have little need of analysts as technology advisers. They escape without having to give a cent to Ceasar, or Caligula for that matter.

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.

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