
Ask HN: Why and how is Gartner Inc. still relevant? - tamersalama
I just came across one of Gartner&#x27;s most recent publications (predictions, trends, ...).<p>I&#x27;m finding it hard to distill through the fluff to find meaningful insights. 
Their trends are dated and it feels as if someone has spilled the buzzword paint on a slide deck.<p>I&#x27;m experiencing first-hand the mess they have caused by suggesting an operational&#x2F;outsourcing model that makes it extremely hard to get anything done other than planning.<p>How are they still relevant?
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chomp
Is there a better corporate insights and research firm that you know of?

Their trends seem dated because they're not going to feed enterprises bleeding
edge tech trends; they're going to go with trends that are mostly proven, so
yes at that point they're probably going to be a bit stale. Large enterprises
with minimal tech advocacy/leadership in the senior leadership team eat this
stuff up because they don't know much better.

Frankly, if your business is struggling with operations to a point where they
are bringing in third parties to get told to outsource operations, I feel like
your business has a competency problem that you can't place squarely on the
shoulders of Gartner.

~~~
dplgk
So basically Gartner is there to gobble up money from incompetence.

~~~
Kalium
You could look at it that way!

Some might describe Gartner as a company that dispenses reasonable advice on
demand to companies who need guidance on subjects well outside their core
competencies. This is very much making money from incompetence, but it's the
sort of profiting from incompetence that every expert adviser does.

~~~
goatherders
Well said, although I would trade "ignorance" for "incompetance." People in
business have to regularly make decisions outside of their comfort zone. That
means they often start as ignorant, not incompetent.

As for the thread at hand, I second the answer that Gartner exists to provide
executives a backstop of something goes wrong. People dont often get fired for
buying something in the magic quadrant.

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jm4
There is a lot more to it than those magic quadrants and articles that vendors
send you. It’s not really fair to pick out an article or two and then say they
are crap. It seems to be the cool thing to pick on them and most of the people
that do have basically zero experience with them. I suspect most of the bad
rap comes from the bullshit ads vendors send out that reference some Gartner
article.

When you sign up with them you are assigned an executive partner who helps
develop your strategy, you get access to over a thousand analysts that are
SME’s in various fields, access to a massive library of articles and it’s a
good networking opportunity. The EP is where it’s at. It’s someone with a lot
more experience than you have who you can work with directly, bounce ideas off
of, get advice from, etc. I guess sort of a mentor for hire is one way to look
at it. I know people that swear by Gartner and renew year after year.

That said, it wasn’t a great fit for me. I don’t want to call it a complete
waste, but it wasn’t worth it. I am apparently an outlier among their clients
because they have a very high retention rate.

~~~
monkeydreams
Another important aspect of Gartner is that it provides a common language and
common abstractions for the reality of managing organisations. Concepts like
magic quadrants, et al, are not exactly correlated with the reality, but the
correlation is strong enough and simple enough that if both you and a vendor
are aiming for the same abstract goal, you have a decent chance of ending up
in the same real ballpark with minimal effort.

That said, there are a million different conceptual frameworks out there and
Gartner only specialise in a handful.

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pinewurst
Most of Gartner's income comes from serving as a sort of strategic IT help
desk rather than from the publications you cite. They provide as much of a
sanity check for enterprise/commercial IT decision making as a customer
desires.

Individually, their experts are actually pretty knowledgeable IMHO more so on
average than IT executives tend to be. There are many morons out there in
decision making roles and there are many worse advisors than Gartner e.g.
"advisors" who are unduly influenced by vendor payoffs (1st hand knowledge not
supposition).

~~~
djfergus
>> They provide as much of a sanity check for enterprise/commercial IT
decision making as a customer desires.

Exactly.

No-one gets fired for buying the vendor in the top-right corner of a Gartner
matrix...

I'm also amused by vendors (often start-ups) releasing PRs about being listed
in a Gartner Hype Cycle report. "Look we're here, at the top!". i.e.
overhyped...

~~~
rchaud
> I'm also amused by vendors (often start-ups) releasing PRs about being
> listed in a Gartner Hype Cycle report.

It's outside validation, which to a prospective customer is more useful than
those "content marketing" pieces these companies put out, which are usually
thought pieces about problems in the target industry. Of course, they make
sure to liberally sprinkle references to their own SaaS and how cheap and easy
it is to switch from your existing BI/CRM/cloud solution.

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hyperman1
Don't look at them as providing advice. Look at them as providing these two
things:

* They provide assurance against bad decisions. Every exec wants to have someone to point at when a few millions were wasted. Don't get me wrong here. The job of a higher-up exec probably implies wasting a few millions every now and then by taking the best course in adverse circumstances.

* They provide a neutral judge for execs surrounded by warring factions - and they don't even have to be internal. At our company I see how A is a sane option, but B is used by a competitor. Even if said competitor bleeds money as a result, we regularly hire the same contractors, and they love reusing their investment and see you bleed money (to them) by giving you also B. What do you do while they whisper in the ear of your boss?

When companies get big enough to become vulnerable to sociological
dysfunctionality, Gartner can help a lot. Or make things much worse.

~~~
techpop10
Gartner is a very expensive and unreliable CYA resource. This may sound
brutal, but take a look at their authors. Most have never actually worked with
the technology they are writing about and almost never have hands-on
experience. They are pundits, on the sidelines, talking to a very small subset
of users and making very broad conclusions. Often times the executives (and
their subordinates) that rely on their reports are more knowledgable about the
technology. Some even speculate that the more vendors pay for their consulting
services, the better they write about you. I'm not convinced it's pure payola
as much as it just bad analysis.

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crwalker
I've found the Gartner hype cycle paradigm to be vastly overrated after
experiencing real hype cycles in several industries.

If you examine their hype cycle charts over about a decade, you'll notice that
technologies join or leave the chart randomly, and very few actually move in a
linear fashion along the hype cycle: the charts offer no real predictive
power.

I think the "hype cycle" narrative only matches a small fraction of tech
innovations. Sometimes tech is adopted in a fairly smooth sigmoid. Sometimes
it dies suddenly pre-plateau because it was actually vaporware or a substitute
became more competitive. Sometimes there's a single giant hype cycle (dot-
com?). Sometimes there are several repeating cycles (looking at you today,
cryptocurrencies).

~~~
Alex63
Gartner's publicity pieces, including hype cycles and magic quadrants, serve
the purpose of giving non-technical executives and decision makers a high-
level understanding of the risk of choosing a particular technology or vendor.
For these users, all that matters is getting a snapshot of the present moment.

Gartner also sells research and analysis reports, and subscriptions for these
services. These materials, IME, are of higher quality and can be a good
introduction or exploration of a particular issue or technology. But they are
definitely more oriented toward the senior leader than to the person in the
trenches.

~~~
crwalker
Fair enough: I am most critical of the hype cycle itself, and haven't looked
through the longer publications in detail.

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chowyuncat
I’ve heard it claimed that those in leadership use it to justify the purchase
of a product. Sort of a “nobody ever got fired for buying what Gartner
recommended.”

~~~
hnzix
Gartner exists so that greasy salesdroids can convince Pointy Haired Bosses to
buy enterprise shovelware without consulting with their technical staff. Then
the technical staff have to try and implement said shovelware in the least
odious way possible.

So much budget will be spent on this project that it will be deemed Too Big To
fail. The shitty software will sit underused for a few years until everyone
forgets about it then it will be quietly sunsetted.

It's sort of like a corporate job creation scheme.

~~~
Latteland
Yes, gartner is an evil creature of the corporate idiocy world. Instead of
getting someone in your company that knows about an area, idiot bosses consult
the gartner oracle to make choices. I've worked at several tech companies that
overobsess on gartner, because they believe (apparently truely), that gartner
love can really help your product.

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eigenvector
Executives hire Gartner to tell them in PowerPoint format for $100,000 what
their own engineers/professionals could have told them for free over lunch if
they ever actually got out of their offices and talked to the people who run
the nuts and bolts of the company.

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nathanaldensr
Gartner provides plausible deniability for inevitable leadership mistakes.
"Hey, it was in the Magic Quadrant! It wasn't our fault our implementation
failed!"

~~~
lotyrin
Where the opposite conclusion would actually make sense... right?

"Lots of people have succeeded with Brand A, but we failed... so I guess it
must our fault."

~~~
rubyfan
That’s exactly how I would have reacted to the parent in real life. Your
failed execution is your fault.

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9wzYQbTYsAIc
At one point a few years back, while people were being holier-than-thou agile
evangelists, Gartner was putting forth well reasoned arguments about having
steady slow teams and innovative fast teams. Pretty much arguing an end run
around the whole Agile-everything political movement in a way that an
Enterprise would be able to benefit from what they know works and also from
the Agile development front.

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booleandilemma
It’s what happens when you have too many non-technical people in decision-
making positions. They never heard of big O notation or hashsets but they all
know about Gartner.

It provides a way for them to say “I think we should do X” without knowing
anything about X except that Gartner recommended it. Gartner gives them a
right to have an opinion.

~~~
avip
I'd challenge you, as a thought experiment, to try and inwardly answer a
question s.a "should we pick azure, aws or gcp". You may use your vast
knowledge of O notations.

~~~
booleandilemma
Oh please, you know exactly what I mean.

~~~
nil_pointer
He's right though

~~~
rubyfan
Point being made is that actual experience with aws, azure or google cloud
would be preferable to reading some white paper.

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nunez
Gartner is useful because they have tons of data on just about anything in the
IT space. The Magic Quadrant is the tip of the iceberg and the thing that
people know they for best, but they do tons of research (as they are a
research company), which helps people in leadership positions who need to make
big technical decisions make those decisions (with help from other data
points, of course). They also have the whole "every IT exec uses Gartner; why
aren't you" effect going for them.

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reilly3000
I've used their public reports to discover vendors. I always find more than I
was aware of with Google and Github searches.

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jmpman
They speak with customers who have purchased product X. Although most T&C
prevent sharing pricing information with others, customers will share that
info with Gartner. Want to buy product X, how do you know you’re getting a
fair price? That’s where Gartner earns its value. Did you remember to
negotiate for future price lock-in for “no greater than”? Gartner will advise
you on what to look out for and how to negotiate your contracts. In a world
with information asymmetry, Gartner helps deobfuscate the pricing.

------
bank_4640
It's still relevant because it's for job security.

When IT management needs to decide which product/service to use, they need to
explain to the business (e.g. front office) why they choose A instead of B.
Showing the report helps.

When product/service A messes up, IT management needs to come up with an
explanation on why they've chosen a bad product/service. Showing other
products/services look even worse in the report again helps. In other words,
the chosen one is already one of the best in the market.

Given that the company pays for the report, why would IT management not ask
for a copy as it costs them nothing?

This is not to say all IT management uses it to make their job safe but they
can't lose by using those products/services in the report. In other words,
they are taking enormous risk using a product not suggested/covered in the
report and what would be their incentive to do so especially having gone
through the financial crisis?

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pw
Most people, even those in positions of authority, are morons.

~~~
mpclark
"...when it comes to my area of expertise"

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mathattack
If you’re purchasing or renegotiating something for the first time on a large
scale (say a monitoring tool or key—value database) a 30 minute call with one
of their analysts can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars. They add an
enormous sales team on top of that.

~~~
techpop10
Nonsense. Most Gartner analysts have never touched the tools they write about.
The interview a small set of users to draw broad conclusions. Overpaid
journalists at best.

~~~
mathattack
The writing is weak, but if you want to buy a product with opaque pricing,
they know what people are paying for it.

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Rjevski
Bullshit companies like this (they aren't alone - there is also Accenture,
Deloitte, and plenty others) will be around as long as there are idiots who
believe in their bullshit and are happy to pay them good money to produce it.

------
jamieweb
Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, right?

~~~
scarface74
Nobody ever got fired for choosing the vendor in the upper right quadrant of
the Gartner Magic Square.

~~~
beat
And honestly, they shouldn't.

Engineers wanting shiny resume padding to play with can hate on it all they
want, but they're not the ones doing the firing.

------
tony-allan
In a corporate IT environment this is a cheap way for IT professionals to
augment local skills especially for high-level strategy and planning. I always
found it useful to quote from Gartner reports in internal reports -- an easy
way to summarise an issue.

You do need to push past the buzzwords and it needs to be used with some care
by non-IT people who cannot always see the corporate implications of some
recommendations.

Gartner conferences are also good value.

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USAAnon
1\. Gartner charge vendors money for their services and they charge clients
for distributing their. ‘Knowledge’.

2\. If you could see the $$ signs charged to vendors by Gartner for every
vendor they list in the magic Quadrant would it colour your opinion of the
magic quadrant and their recommendations ?

Journalists who have a vested interest have to declare it in any report - why
should Gartner be any different ?

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thetricia
It's relevant the way organizations like CNN are. In an age where there's very
little information asymmetry and everybody's equally an expert, legacy brands
serve as a credentialing baseline.

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kthejoker2
90% of the working world has at best indifference and at worst outright
hostility to technology, and research firms are IT equivalent of the Gell Mann
Amnesia.

In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king.

You are an outlier. Take advantage of it, but also don't overvalue it.

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stcredzero
Here's a part of the answer. They surround themselves with the trappings of
power. They know how to "speak" the nonverbal language of power, how to do it
well, and they never fail to do it.

That is probably some huge fraction of it, right there.

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Yhippa
I wonder what their accuracy rate is? I imagine there's a bias towards them
looking good because people accept their suggestions ("nobody got fired for
buying IBM") and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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neduma
[https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar](https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar) is
relevant?

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baybal2
At least, they predicted one thing: smartphones

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kapauldo
Same as Oracle, they're an excellent sales org with a commodity product.

