Are the research websites like Gartner, AMR, Forrester fake?

[meblogger]

I got to read an article on this subject and it seemed that these research websites are not the same they look like. What are your thoughts?

[SupplyChainQuant]

The research websites such as Gartner, AMR, Forrester and so forth are indeed legitimate.

I'd like to understand where your concerns are coming from?

[TopLink]

I got to read an article on this subject and it seemed that these research websites are not the same they look like. What are your thoughts?

As SCQ has commented. What is your concern? They are well known research companies.

[meblogger]

My top 2 concerns are:

1. These websites rate only those companies that contact them and present their cases and ignore those players which do not contact them or pay money to them for rating them in their so called magic quadrants or wave ratecharts etc.
2. They depend on written material and couple of interviews from the participant companies but never go in details wherein some of their researchers actually verify the claims made by participant companies - this makes them a surrograte marketing agents for the companies that pay them to rate them

Above concerns come fomr the fact that one of the vendors that we deployed after taking a look at their evaluation chart which said that the vendor has more than 2000 experts in the said technology but when we did not get good resources from them during the project, we drilled down and found that they had fewer than 800 experts in that technology and the vendor accepted the fact that research website has exaggerated the numbers. May be somebody from the marketing department had given those numbers to the research companies and they published without counter verifying

[SupplyChainQuant]

In the link to the "blog" entry provided, the author noted many interesting points, however - one in particular stands out that I'd like to call attention to:

"remember the fact that these are just enablers for our decisions and we all need to apply our thought process on the top of it to design a winning strategy."

AMR Research, Aberdeen, Garnter, Forrester and the myriad of other researchers and research firms are considered to be high quality firms with established reputations. However, these reputations should not replace the due diligence a company or organization conducts when designing their business strategy. A tool should not replace thought, it should enable it.

My recommendation to you is to conduct your own research into one or more of these firms. Understand their methodology and draw your own conclusions.

Hope this helps.

[TopLink]

My personal experience is limited to using reserach companies like IBIS and IGD. Both of those I have found quite valuable.

[som]

They are market research companies, bound by their obligations to their customers and end users. I have read in news papers that the CPG market leader in India have taken to task some of the research companies. The company launched advertisement campaign based on the research data, with low success. The realization and independent analysis pointed to faulty research data. So it is business that gives the verdict more than us.

Cheers!
Som