As of yesterday, Gartner analysts are now able to blog about topics related to their industry, judging by their posts, this looks like an internal battle they were finally able to win, fantastic news. In light of their upcoming Web Innovation Summit (see the official blog), there is a great deal of focus on social media, the cloud and web 2.0. For many IP companies, making decisions on whether to join the company always requires some degree of uncomfort and a whole lot of trust.
While Gartner has official corporate blogs (as most analyst firms do) the following list of Gartner blogs appear to be personal blogs maintained by individual analysts, I’m great at lists, so here’s a start.
Mark Driver, focus on large scale distributed computing and web technologies.
Ray Valdes, Vice President, Engineering, 2 years, his research on social software is interesting to me.
Gene Phifer: Managing VP of Web Technologies Group
Jeff Mann: As VP of Research, Jeff has a personal blog, but discusses analyst related duties from his Twitter account. Aside from being interesting, he’s been a real gentleman towards me.
What’s interesting in Gene’s comments is that he writes the following: “Thanks to all for the welcome aboard. Several of us have been chomping at the bit to get out into the blogosphere. Stay tuned–the last I heard about 50 Gartner analysts will be joining me”.
As a friendly tip to these new bloggers, I always reccomend to my clients to use Feedburner in order to track growth of subscribers –a great way to measure the ROI of your efforts, but it’s important to do it now from the start, to accurately benchmark growth.
I believe in being a gentleman in business and want to lead community, not break it –it always seems better to respect competitors, and to get energized when they do something interesting. When we’ve smart people from multiple areas of the industry sharing online and talking, the hope is that new information can be shared, confirmation of existing premises, or new ideas can start to form, or at least that’s my answer to Carter’s question. Please take the time to welcome Gartner’s analysts to the conversation, I look forward to being in dialog with them.
As a former employee of Gartner (specifically on the web team)I’m really pleased to see them opening up the door, at last!
Stacey
I agree, more smart people sharing on the web is a good thing.
Jeremiah, great to see your respectful post about the competition and the comment about leading, not breaking the community. I’d love to see such mature approach becoming standard on the web.
Thanks for your kind words. Now I just have to find the time to really get blogging. Twitter is about all I can squeeze in during the Symposium and conference season.
A warm welcome to the blogosphere to the Gartner analysts. Looking forward to your stories, insights, and opinions.
Jeremiah, perhaps the more interesting storyline here is the fact that it’s *September 2008* and a “leading” analyst firm in the technology arena has decided to “allow” their analysts to write blog posts for the first time.
The continued fragmentation of market influence, and growth of boutique market research and consulting firms, are the direct result of short-sighted decisions made by legacy executives at Gartner (and others like them).
Fantastic news? Hardly. More accurately, a troubling admission of apparently being oblivious to a significant shift in the marketplace.
Gartner clients, even the most conservative ones, must have noted the irony in this announcement. If not, then please do excuse me for stating the obvious.
David
Good point. But it looks like they get the conversation now.
Jeremiah, great to see your respectful post about the competition and the comment about leading, not breaking the community. I'd love to see such mature approach becoming standard on the web.