There’s a lot of buzz and chatter going on around the usefulness of Analyst and Research reports these days. Being in the vendor space for over a decade, I have come to (sometimes) love and (sometimes) hate the ‘game’ of trying to get my organization’s little black vendor dot as high on the right, or with as many full pie matrices, or the maximum amount of checkboxes in these various reports. It’s amazing the amount of time and energy that some organizations take to answer questions the perfect way, build the perfect demo, and spin their story in just the right way to make the analyst raise their mark just a few millimeters from their previous evaluation. You sometimes wonder how successful these organizations would be if they took the same amount of time and effort on their customer projects.

I work for a firm today that doesn’t show up on too many of these various reports. The reasons it doesn’t are similar to the reasons others don’t – we don’t fit into the box that analysts have defined as a “pure” software company. Well, that’s a perfect reason to not educate and inform the buying audience about us, right? Interestingly enough, we’ve been vastly successful at competing against many organizations that find themselves LEADING on these reports, or even others that are RIDING THE WAVE. (more…)