IDC lays off eight analysts and 15 additional staff

Tips started coming into SageCircle last night. Over the last twelve hours we have identified five six of the eight analysts. Out of respect to the analysts we will not publish the names.*

In an e-mail exchange with SageCircle, IDC Corporate Communications Director Michael Shirer released the following statement:

• On May 20, IDC reduced its U.S. headcount by 23 — this represents 1% of IDC’s 1,680 employees worldwide.
• Most of the staff reductions came from

What to do when analyst firms lays off analysts

SageCircle has learned that IDC has initiated a round of analyst layoffs. At this time the exact number of staff and coverage is not known. AR teams need to hope for the best for their favorite IDC analysts, but plan for the worst.

Of course, layoffs impact real people with families and obligations. Often AR people are genuinely friendly with the analysts they work with and this sort of news can be a shock. Unfortunately for AR professionals, analyst firm layoffs also raise important issues that need to be addressed ASAP no matter how much sympathy they feel for the analysts caught in the layoffs.

The stark reality is that an analyst firm will not admit that

Influence is not a zero-sum game so analyst influence is not necessarily diminished by the rise of bloggers

A common thread in blog postings is that because bloggers are becoming more influential, analysts have to becoming less influential. Also, not a week goes by where we hear that some vendor executives – who often loathe the communications and tech industry analysts – have said that analysts and AR are less relevant due to social media. The common underlying idea is that influence must be a zero-sum game where there is a finite and fixed amount of influence in the universe. If one group increases their influence then other influencers have to see their influence decrease. Nonsense. 

The amount of influence is not fixed, but can grow and morph over time as we pointed out in the SageCircle’s Fog of Influence. For instance, the