Gartner sued for $1.3Bn
By Pulkit Sharma

Gartner, Inc is the world's leading information technology research and advisory company and has 4000 Associates in 80 countries. It says it has 60 thousand clients. Its reports and recommendations are used by big business to buy expensive goods and services.

Mark Kobayashi-Hillary is one of the key players in the world of tech journalism and outsourcing.  Mark is so highly regarded that he has been invited as one of the judges for Computing Magazine Awards, NOA Outsourcing Awards as well as CNET Tech awards.  He has been invited to speak by a number of prestigious organizations like NASSCOM and London School of Economics.

Mark Kobayashi-Hillary has blogged (and his thoughts echoes the feelings of many in the Indian IT industry) about the need to question the magic at Gartner. This is relevant to India as a number of Indian tech/telecom companies like Infosys, Tata Comm, TCS and others make their way into this Gartner Magic Quadrant.

“
Email archiving vendor ZL Technologies has filed a $1.3 billion lawsuit against the analyst firm Gartner. The reason? ZL doesn’t like where Gartner has been positioning it in the Gartner Magic Quadrant.

For those of you who are not aware, Gartner regularly publishes charts called Magic Quadrants that use two axes to demonstrate where various suppliers sit in relation to each other using two variables – such as ability to execute on the vertical axis and completeness of vision on the horizontal.

The Magic Quadrant device is proprietary to Gartner, so it keeps the methodology very close to its chest, but this obfuscation is the root of ZL’s complaint. The company claims that a small innovative firm, such as ZL, is penalised by the Magic Quadrant system, which rewards big firms, with big sales, and big marketing budgets.

Gartner will do everything it can to keep the ranking mechanism secret, because if it was open, who would pay handsomely for the privilege of reading the research? But at the same time, isn’t it disturbing that a proprietary research device such as this can influence and affect so many major purchasing decisions? Surely it’s time for more openness on the input variables, triggers, and weighting, so the process can be better understood by the sourcing market without necessarily giving away the magic dust?
“

Tech blog Webguild shared some of Mark’s views: “Over the years many companies have alleged that the more your pay Gartner the higher yours products rank. It became an industry joke that Gartner was a Microsoft shop because Microsoft could pay the most”

This insightful research by Mark is not what Gartner would be recommending to its clients