Thursday, July 13, 2006

James Governor told off by Gartner

James Governor at Redmonk has been told by Gartner that he cannot link to this page on its website.

The page in question is a reprint of the Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, 1Q06. You can still access the report (free of charge) directly from the website of the people who bought the reprint, SAS.

The link is also available from our friends at ARmadgeddon.

And Rob Stevens has posted about it too.

It's on the Business Intelligence Knowledge Base where it was posted by someone from SAS and on the Intelliminds news page.

You can read the full story first hand on James' blog (make sure not to miss the comments).

Sometimes you've got to watch in wonder and amazement and just ask "why?"

Update:
For the sake of completeness, Gartner has since apologised. See the comments thread on this post from James.

A few more analysts in Europe

The analyst firms are busy hiring so there's a host of new analysts who have started covering various sectors of the European market.

I know that there are plenty of others, but here are some of those we have come across recently:

At IDC, Jakob Heckscher has started as a senior research analyst covering the European supply chain management and CRM markets.

Staying at IDC, Joao da Silva has joined the European Mobile and Wireless team, joining Lars, Paolo and Rosie.

Forrester has taken on Phil Sayer in its European Telecoms and Networks team and Ricardo Arruda as an analyst on the Financial Services research team.

And it's not just the big firms.

Canalys continues its expansion. New analysts there in the past couple of months include Pete Cunningham and Mehar Zulfikar.

Quocirca is growing again. Louella Fernandes has started as a principal analyst covering enterprise printing, business intelligence and geo-locational tools. She comes from Canon, where she was European developer relations programme manager. (And while you're checking out Louella's biog, take time to notice the new Quocirca website).

And finally (for now anyway) Freeform Dynamics is also expanding and has hired David Perry. He's specialising in telecoms, networking and security.

Monday, July 03, 2006

More about influence than analysts

My esteemed colleague Antony Mayfield is leaving Harvard PR (a sister firm within the Bell Pottinger Group) to join a search engine optimisation firm, Spannerworks.

What has this got to do with industry analysts? Well, very little.

But Antony's explanation for his move is a real insight into influence and how it could be changing.

His "10 reasons I am leaving PR consultancy to join an SEO" post is well worth a read.

Mobile analyst goes blonde for charity

Update: Paolo's hair raised £730 for charity. Nice one.

Paolo Pescatore, from IDC's European mobile and wireless team, has gone blonde. And it's all for charity.

It started as a joke (if you really want to know, you can ask Paolo to tell you the story) but so many people offered to contribute, he decided to go through with it.

Paolo is donating all the money he collects to the Great Ormond Street children's hospital .

Ovum acquires Summit Strategies; fills 'utility computing' gap

Ovum has acquired Summit Strategies, a US analyst firm.

According to Ovum, this acquisition helps the company fill a gap in its coverage of utility computing.

At a cost of around $1.2 million that's obviously not the only reason. Chris Dines, Ovum CEO, explained: "Summit Strategies brings to us expertise and products in an important and growing area of the IT market. It allows us to develop a stronger relationship with blue-chip IT vendor customers and further strengthens our position in the US market."

The press release specifically names IBM, HP, and Microsoft as three of Summit's blue-chip clients.

I was talking to an ex-Ovum employee this morning. They were generally positive and highlighted similarities with a previous takeover which proved successful for Ovum:

"It seems like a sensible move, although it's not going to change the world. One interesting thing is that in many ways it mirrors the Holway acquisition - a small team with a vendor/market focus that adds specific geographic weight. Ovum knows it can execute on acquisitions like this and get value in the medium term out of them."

UPDATE:
ARmadgeddon has an interesting view on this. Find it here.