IIAR Silicon Valley set for January 21st

Institute of Industry Analyst Relations (IIAR) cordially invites you to its 2010 kick-off meeting in Silicon Valley on Thursday, January 21, at Cisco’s headquarters in San Jose

Agenda:

• Trends in the Analyst Ecosystem – SageCircle
• IIAR Initiatives Update – IIAR board member Peggy O’Neill
• Cocktails and Networking – Hosted by Cisco

Event: Institute of Industry Analyst Relations 2010 Kickoff Meeting
Date: January 21, 2010
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 pm US PT
Location: Cisco HQs in the heart of Silicon Valley

RSVP to Peggy O’Neill (peggy.oneill@analystrelations.org) for address and details by January 15.

Trends in the Analyst Ecosystem: 2010 will be a Year of Accelerating Change

 by SageCircle

2009 was a brutal but not fatal year for the IT and telecommunications industry analysts. There were widespread layoffs at the firms, but no firms imploded. Mergers and acquisitions continued to be a tool for financially strong firms, but we also saw the launch of new firms to counter any consolidation. Social media adoption by analysts grew, but it was lumpy. These and other factors provided significant challenges to the analyst relations (AR) community, itself under pressure from the recession. Unfortunately, even though the analyst ecosystem is emerging from the recession, 2010 will provide no respite for AR. In fact, AR will have to deal with accelerating change.  We expect

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Analyst Ecosystem News – Comings and goings, company news

Tip o’ the hat to the tipsters who provided us with the following tips. Most prefer to be anonymous.

 Arrivals:

Ptak, Noel & Associates – Mike Karp (email) joins Ptak, Noel covering storage and storage services.  Mike will be working out of offices in the Boston area.

Departures:

Freeform Dynamics – David Tebbutt (Twitter) covered social and environmental computing

Gartner – Jim Lundy (Twitter) covered social media has left for Saba (vendor)

Company News:

ARinsights enables users to view analyst photos on their smart phones. Using ARchitect™’s Outlook plugin, AR managers can quickly and easily create an Outlook contact that includes the analyst’s picture. This can be incredibly handy if you are

Highly recommended – Participating in the Gartner Quarterly AR Call on January 7, 2010

The topic we hear analyst relations (AR) professionals and other vendor staff talk the most about is Gartner. There is always something brewing about the Gartnerians’ business model, research methodology, product management and policies that gets under the skin of AR pros around the globe. While there is widespread feeling in the AR community that Gartner does not listen to us, we think that a productive use of an hour is participating in the Gartner Quarterly AR Call and telling the Gartner executives exactly what is on your mind. With a variety of GVPs and VPs participating, we think that AR pros should give these executives the benefit of the doubt that they will listen to well reasoned observations with positive suggestions about how to correct the situation. To register, click here.

This particular AR community will be a little more — and a little less – interesting than most. More interesting because the focus is on the details of how AMR is going to be integrated into Gartner (click here for a round up of SageCircle posts on the AMR acquisition by Gartner). Less interesting if AMR is not relevant to your AR program or if you are not an enterprise research client of AMR.

This particular call should also prove to be interesting to enterprise (aka end user) clients of AMR Research. While the focus is on issues of interest for AR professionals, enterprise clients of AMR should be able to pick up important intelligence about what is happening with their favorite AMR analysts and that could impact contract renewal decisions.

Replay of the webinar “SageCircle Analysis of Gartner’s acquisition of AMR Research” is now available. To receive a link and password to watch a streaming version of the webinar please email “info [at] sagecircle [dot] com”. Please include your job title and company name. Agenda:

• Basics of the deal
• SageCircle Analysis of AMR’s and Gartner’s Motivation
• Highlights from Gartner December 3rd AR Community Call
• Commentary on Points from Gartner AR Community Call
• Recommendations for Research Clients
  • Enterprise
  • Vendors
• Recommendations for Vendor AR Teams

—- Text from Gartner’s email —-

Dear Colleague:As promised during our

Gartner acquires AMR Research – roundup of posts

SageCircle has published a number of posts concerning the acquisition of AMR Research by Gartner, Inc. This blog post will be a convenient go-to place for a roundup of other SageCircle articles. The posts are listed in reverse chronological order.

In addition to this public information, SageCircle Advisory and Online SageContent Library received a SageFlash with deeper analysis and more recommendations. Furthermore, many clients used the event as the trigger for an inquiry with a SageCircle strategist to discuss the implication of AMR being swallowed up by Gartner.

1. Highly recommended – Participating in the Gartner Quarterly AR Call on January 7, 2010
2. Ovum ups the ante in campaign to recruit AMR analysts and sales representatives
3. Analyst departures start at AMR Research
4. Questions from the SageCircle webinar on Gartner’s acquisition of AMR Research
5. Special offers for AMR Research’s clients, sales professionals and analysts
6. Announcing the SageCircle free webinar on Gartner’s acquisition of AMR Research
7. Gartner Acquiries AMR Research for $64m

Replay of the webinar “SageCircle Analysis of Gartner’s acquisition of AMR Research” is now available. To receive a link and password to watch a streaming version of the webinar please email “info [at] sagecircle [dot] com”. Please include your job title and company name. Agenda:

• Basics of the deal
• SageCircle Analysis of AMR’s and Gartner’s Motivation
• Highlights from Gartner AR Community Call
• Commentary on Points from Gartner AR Community Call
• Recommendations for Research Clients
  • Enterprise
  • Vendors
• Recommendations for Vendor AR Teams

What should you do if one your top ranked analyst firms is involved in a merger & acquisition event?

M&A will be part of the analyst ecosystem in 2010 and beyond. Whenever there is a significant event in the analyst market, SageCircle clients receive an immediate SageFlash with analyis and recommendations on the steps research consumers and AR should do. In addition, Advisory clients can schedule a phone-based inquiry to discuss how to apply these steps to their particular situation. We can do individual calls as well as a teleconference for an enterprise’s or vendor’s entire team.
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Non-clients can quickly and easily sign up for a two-hour Advisory Hour Block for only $495. Please give SageCircle a call at 503-636-1500 if you want to discuss the implications of this layoff.

Ovum ups the ante in campaign to recruit AMR analysts and sales representatives

Tip o’ the hat to the tipsters who sent in information about this Ovum news

Updated 12/16/09 1:32 pm PT – Added photo of truck outside Gartner’s HQ

Here is the Ovum truck making the rounds around Gartner main offices on Top Gallant Road in Stamford, CT (click on the picture to enlarge). Carter’s office use to be on the second floor nearest Top Gallant Road. Carter says that this truck would be quite visible from any of the window offices.

Please read the comments below. A Guerilla Billboards staffer mentions that a member of Gartner’s legal team came out and told the driver to get lost. Interesting.

As SageCircle reported in Special offers for AMR Research’s clients, sales professionals and analysts Ovum is one of the firms that is making a play for AMR’s sales and analyst staff. This is a common tactic by competing firms immediately after the announcement of a sizeable acquisition. However, offers like these do not necessarily result in the pickup of key staff because there is little effort put into the campaign. Usually there is just an announcement on the poaching firms’ websites and maybe a few phone calls to staff at the targeted firm.

Ovum has demonstrated that it is willing to increase the stakes by actually investing in getting the attention of the staff at the targeted firm. SageCircle has received reports about the rolling billboard that Ovum put on the streets of Boston to circle the Gartner and AMR Research offices (see picture). While this technique is likely a modest expense it does demonstrate that Ovum is serious about expanding its presence in the US market where it has a relatively small presence. In addition, it is a nifty publicity stunt sure to get some notice.

This development could work to the advantage of enterprises and vendors looking to wrap up contracts before

Analyst departures start at AMR Research

12/10/09 9:35 am PT – Initial post

SageCircle received a credible tip and subsequently confirmed that AMR Research VP Lora Cecere, who managed a team of analysts on how to drive greater value from the supply chain, is leaving AMR. At this point we do not know the circumstances, e.g., whether Lora left voluntarily or was part of a downsizing due to Gartner’s acquisition. SageCircle had received reports that Lora was one of AMR’s top producers. Lora had been at Gartner from 2000-02.

This comes in wake of the Gartner SVP of Research Peter Sondergaard’s announcement that all analysts had been given offer letters to stay with the new AMR. This could be the case of an analyst deciding not to join the new firm or AMR doing some downsizing prior to the official takeover by Gartner to spare the new owners the task of laying off analysts they said they would retain.

If you have tips about analysts who are leaving AMR Research or related research areas at Gartner, please send them to “info [at] sagecircle [dot] com” and we will confirm them before posting them.

Replay of the webinar “SageCircle Analysis of Gartner’s acquisition of AMR Research” is now available. To receive a link

2009 the year that was in the analyst ecosystem

2009 was interesting to say the least when it came to the analyst ecosystem and the analyst relations (AR) community. Now is good time to step back and do a quick review of what happened in 2009 to prepare for looking ahead to 2010. Luckily for us, we have a lot of content to draw upon as SageCircle has become the definitive source of analyst ecosystem news and commentary. In 2009 we published over 250 blog posts with over 1,000 comments. Many of the blog posts started with information from the community, both analysts and AR, with almost all the comments coming from the community. 

People are still very interested in the analysts – SageCircle’s blog gets about 25,000 unique visitors per month, which is pretty good for such a narrowly-focused blog. However, we always get a huge spike in readership whenever there is news about the analyst firms (e.g., layoffs and M&A). News related posts are also the ones that typically get the most comments, links, and tweets. 

The recession has been brutal, but not fatal for firms – Early 2009 was very tough for analyst firms with layoffs by at least 13 firms, cancelation of events, and plummeting consulting revenues. However, unlike the last recession, there have not been any prominent firms that went out of business. We checked the SageCircle newsletters from the previous tech recession (roughly 2001-03) and every month we were reporting on the shuttering of some analyst firm. That has not been the case this time around. In addition, the second half of 2009 has seen reports of firms starting to see improved revenues and event attendance starting to recover.

Social media’s adoption by the analyst ecosystem has been expanding, but lumpy – The number of analysts and AR professionals on Twitter has more than doubled in the last year – but that does not mean that