Forrester Research, Inc. Q4 and FY08 earnings call is scheduled – Acquisitions? Layoffs? Something out the ordinary?

This earnings call should be much more interesting than recent quarters in the wake of the recent layoffs of analysts at five firms and the cancellation of Gartner’s  Spring Symposium. So far, Forrester has not announced any layoffs, but sometimes companies regardless of size or market will announce job actions during an earnings call to show Wall Street analysts that management is taking the recession seriously. In addition, Forrester could announce an acquisition like it did at the 2Q FY08 call with the purchase of JupiterResearch.

Forrester’s earnings call is on February 11th at 8:00 a.m. PT. The earnings call is a webcast that you can find on Forrester’s investor relations webpage. This call is coming one week after Gartner’s earnings call.

I don’t listen to the Gartner and Forrester earnings calls with the same mindset as a financial analyst. What I listen for are clues to how the two publicly traded analyst firms are

Forrester loses third social media analyst – When do departures start to impact analysis and client service?

So, this is almost not news anymore – Forrester loses another social media analyst. In this case, Brian Haven (blog, Twitter handle) is leaving to join Peter Kim (see here for his departure news) at a startup. The other recent departure from Forrester’s social media research was Groundswell co-author Charlene Li (see here). The math so far is three analysts from one research team leave in less than six weeks. 

Think about the bigger picture. Changes in Forrester’s social media research team have been quite “interesting” lately with new hires, significant departures, the Groundswell book publication and the acquisition and integration of JupiterResearch.

Forrester can rightly claim that it has sufficient social media research head count on staff because of the JupiterResearch acquisition and new hires. However, the constant churn

Forrester buying Jupiter – smart, but not a big deal

There has been commentary in the blogosphere about the larger meaning of Forrester’s acquisition of JupiterResearch. Typically this commentary has focused on points like the analyst industry is consolidating and that major firms are losing relevance and influence in the age of blogs and other social media. It is our opinion that this commentary is wrong and that the acquisition of Jupiter by Forrester does not portend some deep consolidation of the analyst industry due to the rise of the blogosphere, rather it is business as usual. 

To get some perspective, let’s look at a little history of the analyst industry.

Analyst firms have long used acquisitions to fill gaps in coverage and geography or pick up client bases. For example, in the last 15 years since Gartner went public for the second time, it has made over 70 acquisitions to pick up expertise in specialized coverage, get into new markets (e.g., learning software), and to broaden its footprint in

Forrester acquires JupiterResearch – will the analysts stay or walk?

Forrester Research acquired JupiterResearch for $23 million in cash plus assumed liabilities. JupiterResearch joins Forrester’s Marketing & Strategy Client Group. Click here to read the press release and click here to read a blog post by analyst Josh Bernoff.

The key question for any analyst firm merger & acquisition (M&A) activity is whether the acquired analysts – the core intellectual property value – stay with their new employer or leave. For example, in the case of Gartner’s acquisition of META more than 50% of the analysts left voluntarily or through buyouts within a few months.

Our initial impression is that the JupiterResearch acquisition is more of an expansion of Forrester’s services than a consolidation move to eliminate a competitor. This is similar to Forrester’s Giga acquisition, but different from Gartner’s grab of META which was clearly a strategic move to

Word cloud generator by Wordle

From the website: “Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.” And a cool toy it is.

Obviously, SageCircle really, really focuses on AR and the analysts (click on the graphic to the right to enlarge).

However, Wordle is not just a toy, but potentially a useful tool for analyst relations professions with analysts that blog. Now you can in a minute with only a simple cut-and-paste of a URL get a feel for the most frequent – and by extension, most important – words in an analyst’s blog. For example, the word cloud to the left is for 

Announcing a new “Page” – Analyst Tips for AR

There are many interesting blog posts by industry analysts providing tips to the analyst relations (AR) community on how best to interact with the analyst. This is very useful information for AR professionals, both to improve their AR execution, but also to get insights into their analysts.

For awhile, SageCircle has kept a running list of links to these suggestions in a blog post originally published in early February and then updated periodically. The problem is that this particular post is not easy to find unless you knew to look for it. Starting today we have elevated this information into a “Page” called Analyst Tips for AR. A Page is a non-dated post and always shows up in the “Pages” box, which we have at the top of the left navigation bar. A feature of this Page will be a list of updates. This should make it easier for SageCircle readers to keep up with the tips and tricks that the analysts are offering.

In today’s rather large update we have added 14 34 suggestions from three nine analysts. However, because we got a bit behind in updating the list, there are going to be new links added throughout