Blogger: Jamie Lewis
We interrupt this identity conversation for a brief interlude related to Burton Group’s overall business – IT research.
For those who don’t know, we launched a promotion a week or so ago called “Drop a Seat,” in which we offer to give new customers enterprise wide access to one of our services for what our competitors charge for a single seat. We’re doing this because we’re hearing from our current customers and prospects that they’re getting price increases from those competitors, and they like the convenience of our enterprise wide pricing model. We think we have a better deal for enterprises, and thus would like to encourage a comparison.
With the announcement, of course, came at least some attention, and I couldn’t help but notice this blog post by Michael Krigsman on ZDNet. He points to and quotes from this post on Catching Flack, a blog about public relations, as follows:
“Analyst firms that charge vendors for relationships cannot truly objectively comment on the industry. Period. They spend most of their time on the phone with their paying clients (and are the most familiar with their products). They give the lion’s share of their coverage to paying clients. The whole structure of the system is to reward people that pay them and either overlook or outright punish folks that do not.”
I’ll have to admit that when we get painted with this broad brush, it gets my hackles up.
A customer recently asked me about independence issues, in particular how we handle the vendor aspect of our business. My response was simple: we addressed it at the foundation, in our business model. While the quote may accurately describe the business model of some analyst firms, it does not describe ours.
In general, an analyst firm can serve the supply side, or the buy side. We based our business on serving the buy side. About 85 percent of our revenue comes from enterprise buyers of technology products, with the other 15 percent coming from a mix of system integrators and vendors. Our top ten customers (in revenue) last year were all enterprises. We routinely cover, talk to, and discuss with clients vendors that do not subscribe to our research or buy anything from us whatsoever. (For more about what we don't do, see this.)
This all brings to mind a focus group with enterprise clients we held not too long ago. We were testing messaging and positioning with the group, and one of the messages was, “Burton Group is truly vendor-independent, and provides completely unbiased research.”
One respondent reacted negatively, saying, essentially, that all research firms say that, and thus it really wasn’t a good message. He followed that up by saying “but with you guys, it happens to be true.” That made me smile because it reflects the paradox. People tend not to believe such statements, for the very reasons that Michael Krigsman points out. But when customers get a chance to see our work, they see the proof in our pudding. So, when my hackles get up about such things, I simply remind myself that our customers know where our loyalties lie. And that’s why we're doing this promotion, to give more people a chance to see that we mean what we say.
