By Jim Lundy
In my time at my former firm (Gartner), I initiated and delivered numerous Magic Quadrants over the years. There is both an art and a science to delivering a market evaluation and it starts with defining and knowing the market you are evaluating. I trained many analysts how to do this. For the most part, none of my analysts ever got sued, but in recent years CEOs have gotten upset enough that they are filing suit because they didn’t like how they were rated (or the analyst didn’t do a credible job of explaining the ranking).
One thing that started to come up over the years from end users was the whole notion of “who should we pick” and are the “leaders” the only ones worth looking at. Over and over again, I would tell clients that just making the cut and getting into the matrix was often enough to merit consideration of a set of vendors. Often, that was not what they wanted to hear until we had a more in-depth conversation.
This is one of the reasons we are introducing the Aragon Globe. With three evaluation dimensions, it makes it easier for an enterprise to understand the players and the markets that they participate in. We also have clean and concise definitions of the sectors that make up the Globe: Leaders, Innovators, Specialists and Contenders. Clearly, there is a definite place for technology providers in each of these sectors.
The first market we are going to be evaluating is Enterprise Social Networking. You’ll be hearing more about this and in fact we are having a webinar next week to discuss the Aragon Globe(s) in more detail. Sign-up here and even if you can’t make it, we’ll make sure you get the recording.