Gartner and ZL Technologies
October 22, 2009
I zipped through my Overflight output this morning and noticed a story from Silicon Valley Watcher cited in the MarkLogic Web log. A bit of clicking revealed that I was not alone in noticing the item “Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Goes to Court – ZL Technologies Lawsuit”. I don’t know much about lawyers and I know even less about the methods used to populate tables and graphics presented in consulting firm’s reports. I know what I was taught by my boss at Booz, Allen & Hamilton in the 1970s. The methods of other firms are closely guarded secrets.
Consulting is often a marketing game. People often forget this premise of the largely unregulated information niche.
The gist of these Gartner-centric stories is that a company called ZL Technologies alleges damages because of the Gartner firm’s presentation of information. You can read these stories and draw your own conclusions. I located some additional public information, and I will take a look at these on my airplane flight this morning.
Several observations:
- The consulting industry has undergone a dramatic change in the last decade. The emergence of rent-an-expert outfits like the Gerson Lehrman Group, Coleman, and Guidance, among others, make it easy and cheaper to get expert inputs without the big costs levied by large, overhead choked service firms. At the same time, the high end firms—like Booz, Allen & Hamilton—have been struggling internally about how to maintain profits. At Booz, Allen, the outcome of the stress was dividing the firm. Other large consulting firms face pressures as well. Smack in the middle of the rent-an-expert outfits and the dominant high-end outfits are the mid-tier consulting firms. I call these “azure chip firms”, and they are caught between a rock (the top firms like McKinsey and BCG) and a hard place (the rent-an-expert firms). As a result, these mid tier firms have had to find ways to differentiate themselves, generate revenue, and capture headlines. The “reports” some firms issue are means to a revenue end, not pure intellectual efforts.
- Consultants will work overtime to get in the spotlight, build buzz, and become a magnet for sales leads. Consultants who lack star power are like struggling actors who hire an aggressive agent. After a couple of Hollywood projects, I can tell you with confidence that the business methods are pretty darned flexible in La La Land.
- Many companies today look alike. The marketing verbiage is often the same. I know when I was writing the mind numbing Enterprise Search Report, some vendors would offer to assist me in my efforts. I imagine similar offers flow into any firm preparing an industry overview. I recall one outfit that praised a particular CMS. My own experience with this system was that it did not work. The reason the particular CMS was licensed was a direct result of a Web log and consultant who insisted that the product was superior. It wasn’t and I realized that the words often existed in a world different from the reality of the software. In today’s tough economic climate, the line between a profile of a company and marketing collateral is narrow. Consulting firms under pressure may find the fuzziness comfortable. As a result, the reader of a report may not understand fuzziness and see the report as something closer to a PhD student’s thesis. The way to bring clarity to fuzziness is by shaping information to a marketing purpose, not hidden persuaders, just subtle persuaders.
- Companies omitted from influential industry reports may find themselves a bit like a Web site not indexed by Google. If one is not in the report, one does not exist for a certain user slice. Omission, then, is a very powerful editorial decision. I know that I get push back when I tell public relations people who want me to write about their client’s product, “Not my area.” Fortunately no one reads my Web log or my long, dull studies for that matter. When a company has a large client base, the pressure must be many times greater. Humans are quite human; hence the potential for interesting decisions. The answer to the question “How can I gain an advantage?” varies widely from firm to firm.
I have not seen the most recent flock of Gartner magic quadrants. I did learn from a person in Europe that Google continues to drift out of the most desirable quadrant. I found that hard to believe. I spend 90 percent of my time tracking Google’s technology, and in my opinion it is among the leaders in a number of search and content processing sectors. I know that figuring out the technology that makes one vendor superior (successful firm with proprietary technology) to another (a Lucene repackager or a start up with zero track record) is tough. If the person who pointed out Google’s drift in the Gartner quadrant is correct, that interpretation of what the Google possesses is at odds with my research data. This is not surprising. Some of my former colleagues at Booz, Allen & Hamilton gathered data and looked at it in interesting ways in order to find a useful and fresh perspective. That’s why those individuals worked at BAH in the 1970s when the firm was firing on all eight cylinders.
The problem is that most of the people who are “experts” in search and content processing may not know as much as they assume. This is the “they don’t know what they don’t know.” You can see this in the comments to some of my Web log posts. People are not operating from the same fact base as I. Their comments point out that one of my observations is crazy. Yep, if you don’t know what you don’t know, some of my comments do seem crazy. After all, who would market a search system that crashes when it has to process more than 50 million documents? Well, a vendor does in point of fact. Some consulting firms take advantage of this ignorance by making complex issues simple. I have written about the C minus brain that encounters complexity and then reduces it to an absurdly general statement. Sorry. Some methods at Google require knowledge of non Euclidean geometry. I can’t make those numerical recipes “simple”. Others may pluck a handful of new companies from a quick Google search and present them as the latest and greatest. Simplification and the reduction of problems with manifolds to a simple diagram or a grid are fooling themselves, fooling potential licensees, and fooling quite a few “experts”. Fooling is good as long as one is doing stand up at the Comedy Caravan. Fooling is not too helpful in work centric software procurements.
I am not sure where this legal matter will lead. I think that the present economic climate will cause other objections and counter claims to blossom. The net result will be more confusion which, of course, makes it easier for another consultant to cash in.
Part of the present business environment I fear. I have learned to live with this approach to technical information.
Stephen Arnold, October 22, 2009
Dear government watchdogs, I wrote this without compensation. Tess did lick my hand whilst writing this, however. Does that count?
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