Gartner is apparently raising prices 3-5%, so get ready to grit your teeth if you're a Gartner client.
(On a side note, my colleague, Denis Pombriant at Beagle Research, recently implied that Gartner is copying his report formats. Hard to prove in a definitive fashion, but after all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Looking at my Web traffic logs, I certainly see folks from Forrester and Gartner looking at my Web site several times a month.)
But back to the main topic. Gartner's price increase seems counter-intuitive to me -- unless Gartner's idea is to get profitability up in order to shore up the stock price or make Gartner attractive for acquisition. After all, most IT market information has gotten cheaper, and the Web offers tons of free content. Ten years ago, there was real value to a company such as Gartner doing a roundup of vendor information. If an enterprise was about to issue an RFP, it would take it a week just to track down the phone numbers and receive all the paper collateral just so it could get started with the process. However, with Google, that five-day process of generating the long list of possibles is now down to half an hour, if that.
These days, the challenge is not generating the long list of possibles, but the short list tailored to an enterprise's specific needs. Yeah, OK, so according to the Gartner Magic Quadrant, Vendor A has strategic vision. However, its financials are so-so. For Buyer 1, that's a big problem; for Buyer 2, it isn't. So I think making money off of publishing general observations is dwindling -- users read and digest such reports, but they aren't about to pay an arm and a leg for them.
That's why a chunk of my business is behind-the-scenes consulting. Companies find it easy to get baseline information -- now they want to understand how the vendors play in their specific situation. Next week, I spend a day discussing with a company its next move in Web analytics: what vendors and features should it look for? And, since I'm not renting expensive office space in Stamford, Cambridge, or Boston, or supporting a large corporate infrastructure, I can offer my insight at a lower price than the large firms. (Plus, although I've covered Web analytics for the past five years, it's an area that Gartner has never really covered directly, other than a note here and there from the BI practice. Web analytics is not a billion dollar market yet, so in Gartner's view it's not worth following in a concerted fashion.)
Between blogs and boutique analyst firms, the days of the behemoth analyst firms are numbered. While brand names such as Gartner still carry a lot of weight, Gartner's pushing prices up will only its customers realize sooner rather than later that they really want nimble and inexpensive, not ponderous and costly.