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Ask HN: Why and how is Gartner Inc. still relevant?
115 points by tamersalama on Nov 20, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 64 comments
I just came across one of Gartner's most recent publications (predictions, trends, ...).

I'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.

I'm experiencing first-hand the mess they have caused by suggesting an operational/outsourcing model that makes it extremely hard to get anything done other than planning.

How are they still relevant?



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.


This is the most correct answer. If you're Bob's Widget factory looking to upgrade your ERP, WMS, HR management system and have limited technical knowledge, where do you look to get the insight on the variety of choices?

A semi-informed decision is better than just believing the salespeople. Most software/systems in the magic quadrant aren't bad choices.


> A semi-informed decision is better than just believing the salespeople.

I think the siblings post (Gartner exists to gobble up money from incompetence) is closer to home. A semi-informed decision really isn't better. I'm not saying that making your decisions based on marketing hype is a good idea, by any stretch (which is what salespeople and marketing people will base their decision on usually). But outside consultants are really dangerous because they are targets (if not willing participants) in orchestrated attacks against your company. At best they will be trying to extract hundreds of thousands of dollars from you. At worst they will be trying to sink you deliberately. If you go with your salespeople's recommendation, the worst you will get is a bad ERP, WMS, or HR management system. A management consultant can cripple your operations if you follow their advice blindly.

You may think that hard to believe, but I've lived through it enough times to be doubly cautious.


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


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.


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.


In the same way that the supermarket is there to gobble money up from your inability to grow your own vegetables, mix up your own detergents, manufacture your own batteries, etc.


That is a wrong analogy. If you are a retailer competing with Amazon you should be building a competent tech team in-house with some external help if need be rather than relying on fuzzy reports to choose vendors. This is a quick-fix and makes it easier for vendors to fool you (knowing you have no tech competence). Don't reinvent everything but at least be competent enough to choose which supermarket to go to, which veggies to eat, which detergent/battery to use.


I disagree with your entire post. If you are a retailer competing with Amazon then the cost of building a competent tech team in house will bankrupt you. And if you are a retailer competing with Amazon you need a LOT of insight from the market to find ways to compete. It's almost impossible to hire that insight in a reasonable time frame but very possible to find consultants who can help.


This is a question of comparative specialisation. Why learn how to grow an amazing garden, invest hundreds of hours in working that garden, to save a few hundred dollars (and losing the opportunity to earn tens of thousands of dollars) if you can just go to supermarket and buy food?

Why hire a strategic analyst with executive experience for 5 years if all they are going to tell you is 5% more than a Gartner consultant can offer you for 1/10th the annual salary?

To use your analogy, why should this hypothetical retailer hire an in-house team if they can get everything they need from another party for cheaper, with a small opportunity cost? And why is knowing which detergent to purchase making you any less reliant on the comparative specialisation of the supermarket?


They are a consultant like any other. End of the day they are best used as a tool to use as part of a procurement or strategy making process.

Being able to talk to someone with some clue and have access to generally well thought out papers is useful. If you’re an SME in an area, they may give you additional perspective.

If you just read the Magic Quadrant for Business Process outsourcing or whatever and just call the top one, you are dumb. Conversely, if you’re going to be making a purchase in the space, and have never heard of 2/5 vendors on the top right, you may be missing something.


It is a business choice: rely on external people who do research all day or try to invest your own time. The question is: What's your core business?


All of capitalism is making money on incompetence (which you might lazily use to lump in lack of information on the part of a party in a transaction).


> Their trends seem dated because they're not going to feed enterprises bleeding edge tech trends

Not to derail your points; but their trends publication included a framework that is no longer supported. It could’ve taken an intern one minute to update.


Forrester Research[1] is a competitive alternative to Gartner but I think the OP is asking about research firms in general, not specifically Gartner.

[1] https://go.forrester.com/


451 Research does VERY good research and they fully disclose exactly how many respondents, their size and other relevant demographics of their research. You will NEVER see Gartner disclose how they conduct their research and the demographics. You just have to take their word for it.


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.


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.


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).


>> 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...


> 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.


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.


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.


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).


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.


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


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.”


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.


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.


Yes, I think it's more about signaling and CYA than fact-finding.


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.


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


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."


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


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.


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.


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.


Oh please, you know exactly what I mean.


He's right though


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


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.


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


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.


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?


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


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


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.


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.


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


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.


Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, right?


I think some government employees in Canada 'gracefully retired' after the Phoenix cluster F*.


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


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.


I’d say they would now!


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.


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 ?


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.


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.


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.


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.


https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar is relevant?


At least, they predicted one thing: smartphones


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




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