I’m having trouble figuring out whether you’re serious or just trolling. I was guessing “serious” until I noticed you’d cited Aberdeen as an example of responsible research. As you surely know unless you’re VERY new to the IT world, Aberdeen is the poster child for analyst firms that regurgitate vendor marketing materials, without doing significant analysis of their own. They’ve tried to shed that reputation recently, but fairly or otherwise, it’s stuck …

As for my own work, and Gartner’s — have you been around long enough to recall Sybase System 10? In the reporting at the time, all that was crystal-clear was that Gartner and I had jointly broken the story, and that I had been first. But Tony Percy of Gartner did later admit that their research had been accelerated by the fact of my publishing. A LOT of enterprises were saved from very bad technology investments by that analysis. And while some of the evidence came straight from the user community, most of it came from straightforward vendor interviews and critical analysis of same.

It’s a good thing that there are multiple approaches to analysis. If there only were a couple, companies would almost surely game them more successfully than they already do, deliberately or otherwise. As matters stand, we take a number of different angles on the same issues, which serves to, in effect, let us check each other’s work.

If you don’t want to read my work, fine. That will just save me from any further annoying and ill-informed comments you might make. But as to your general point on whether analysts should carefully question vendors’ claims — of course they should, and you’re doing nobody a service to suggest otherwise.

CAM

Gartner Group has no issue with QlikTech along the lines of your imagined “deception”, nor IDC, nor Aberdeen, nor any of the other analysts folks normally follow.

I hadn’t heard of you until I saw your blog posting show up in Google, and now I think I know why. Windmill tilting really doesn’t have a place in the technology world.