James McGovern asks Why Gartner Analysts Don't Blog. You can read his post for the opinions he says he gathered -- and most of them are unflattering.
Although I can't entirely disagree with many of the points James is making, from my experience James is being a bit too harsh with Gartner. There are good people there, such as Massimo Pezzini, who have technical depth, do real research, and provide value to smaller vendors such as us (GigaSpaces) -- and definitely spend more than half an hour briefing with us.
I bet you there is a fierce internal debate going on at Gartner about the question of blogging. Where the competent analysts, such as Massimo, argue for it; and the rest are against it.
All this is just conjecture on my part, but I think it all boils down to the question of Open Source Vs. Closed Source. The anti-blogging folks are probably making the claim that they are in the business of selling their research and analysis, not giving it away for free on the Internet. And frankly, it's not a simple issue. It's one that many software companies, such as us, face.
Few analyst firms have gone completely open source, such as Red Monk, and their model is yet to be proven on a mass scale (although it seems like Red Monk is doing great for a boutique shop). Maybe the mass scale model is dying altogether?
Some analyst firms have found, or are still experimenting, with some middle ground of unpaid blogging and paid research and reports.
The reason I am interested in this topic is that we have been giving the issue a lot of thought at GigaSpaces as well (from a software company perspective, of course). There are many interesting models out there, such as those used by Jive, Atlassian, MySQL and many others.
We're coming up with our own, pretty unique, model. Stay tuned...
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