Can you trust Gartner's 'Magic Quadrant' or other analysts' reports?
A new lawsuit alleges their influential conclusions are biased to those who pay. It may be time for financial-industry-style disclosure rules
Follow @BSnyderSFTalk about David versus Goliath. A tiny Silicon Valley software vendor is taking on mighty Gartner, one of the technology industry's largest and most influential market research and consulting companies. The battle is playing out in a San Jose federal courtroom, where ZL Technologies is asking for $132 million in damages (plus even more in a punitive judgment), saying the research outfit damaged its prospects by ranking it in the bottom segment of its closely watched Magic Quadrant report. The MQ divides technology providers into different classes, with the bottom segment essentially forming a "do not buy" recommendation.
Sure, vendors complain all the time that Gartner or IDC or Forrester and their cousins do a crummy job and unfairly diss their products. Sometimes they have a point; often they don't. There are, after all, a lot of crummy products out there. But the ZL Tech lawsuit raises issues that have bubbled under the surface of the technology industry for years. Most significant, I think, is the common practice of selling research and consulting services to the very companies whose products it evaluates. (Disclosure: IDG, which owns InfoWorld, also owns IDC, a major technology research company that competes with Gartner.)
[ IT faces another information disconnect: Its big vendors' agendas often don't match IT's, as InfoWorld's Eric Knorr explains. | Keep up on the day's tech news headlines with InfoWorld's Today's Headlines: Wrap Up newsletter. ]
"It's naïve to think that it doesn't matter [to a research firm] if a vendor delivers a huge chunk of revenue," says ZL Tech CEO Kon Leong. What's more, he says, vendors with big marketing budgets are unfairly favored by Gartner, and that stifles innovation in the industry. "Small innovative guys are running uphill against the Gartner wind," he told me.
Update: A judge later rejected the lawsuit against Gartner, ending ZL's efforts. But the issues raised remain real.
