Bob Welch, IDC Global Services Market Research Group head, is departing

According to Gerry Van Zandt (twitter handle) “Bob Welch (bio), IDC’s Services Research honcho, is leaving the firm to take a VP position at CSC.”

Tip o’ the hat to Gerry for the tip.

For IT managers – It’s “Praise Your Vendor” Inquiry Day

Now for something completely different… offering the analysts a vendor compliment in lieu of a complaint. Advisory analysts at major firms build their opinions based more on client feedback than on research evaluations. They generally do not do lab analysis or specific competitive research.  That means that the perceptions they have of the products may be more highly colored by negative customer comments heard during client phone-based inquiries than reality would suggest. 

SageCircle Technique:  My suggestion to IT managers is that you

SageCircle launches calendar of Vendor Analyst Events

Twice in the last couple of weeks, we have received requests – one from an analyst and one from a vendor – that SageCircle put together an online calendar to track vendors’ major analyst events. The idea is not new as it has popped up a number of times over the last few years as AR professionals express their frustration on trying schedule major events. Too often a vendor would find that its event was scheduled too close to another vendor in the same market so that both vendors ended up splitting the potential analyst audience.

Today SageCircle is launching a new “Page” (see left hand navigation menu) called Vendor Analyst Events. It is a simple listing by month. Please send us the dates and location of your events and we will post them for free. The events we are interested in are major events like summits and conferences (see definition below).

 Why would a vendor share the date of their analyst event? Wouldn’t that just be giving

Participate in Jeremiah Owyang’s poll “What do analysts do?”

Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang is conducting an interesting survey in  What do analysts do?. I encourage everybody to participate. Details:

“Well of course I have my answer, but I’ve come to realize there’s a lot of misconception out in the market as to what we really do.

Rather than me tell you, I’d want to first learn what you think, so perhaps we, as an industry can better explain our value -and place in the market.

So give it a shot, try to first explain what you think our day job is, then explain the business model. I want open and candid responses, but