Gartnerizing Your Choices
Do you choose a restaurant based on the latest restaurant review? Do you consider which doctor to choose based on the annual “Top Doctors” article? Of course you do. Everybody does it.
The problem with that is you tend to miss the restaurants and doctors who are not on the rating person’s radar screen, which means you can miss a lot.
In the IT world, most of us know about The Gartner Group’s Magic Quandrants (which are trademarked and copyrighted, by the way) and these can be useful for finding out about the market leaders for a certain topic. Generally Gartner makes these ratings available to their subscribers, but oftentimes the favorably rated companies will publish the results for their benefit. Makes sense. I assume that Gartner also charges clients hefty fees for evaluating the companies.
The problem is that Gartner’s ratings don’t look at all companies, and they can’t possibly evaluate every company, which means that they tend to look at the largest companies, the ones with the most marketing dollars, and the ones who pay them to be evaluated.
For a small business looking for a source of services, does the Gartner rating mean anything? Sure, but only to a point. For example – take the July 2009 Gartner report called “Magic Quadrant for Web Hosting and Hosted Cloud System Infrastructure Services (On Demand).” This is an excellent analysis of 15 companies in the cloud hosting business, and the top rated firms are AT&T, Savvis, Terremark, and Rackspace, with IBM trailing the frontrunners a bit.
Of course, if you are like most people, you do what I do and mostly just look at the pictures rather than read the details. In this case, you would just assume that those five companies in the upper right of the chart are the only ones worth considering if you had a big RFP to send out or you wanted not to get fired for choosing the wrong vendor. The problem with this of course, is that you might actually want a Niche Player, which on the Gartner Magic Quadrant charts, is in the left bottom corner, a position that we naturally assume to be BAD. But you may actually want a niche player because of their focus on your specific needs.
In fact, Gartner’s report is careful to point out,
“Smaller providers may do one thing extraordinarily well, but not have a comprehensive set of services that lets them serve a broad array of use cases. More than ever before, it is crucial to look beyond the Magic Quadrant Leaders when selecting a vendor.”
If I only ate at restaurants with the highest Zagat’s rating, I’d be poor and would never know about the dive barbeque place near my house.
This “Gartnerization” syndrome was publicized recently when a smaller firm sued for being marginalized by an RFP selection committee just because they were in the “wrong“ Gartner quadrant. It seems silly, but it does happen in people’s minds, that only the companies appearing in the Gartner ratings are worthy of consideration in the first place, and that among those, only the ones on the top right uppermost part of the quadrant should get their business. It is useful information but does not substitute for common sense and business value.