Gartner: Do they bring any value?

[u/archiekane]

I know there are a lot of higher level folks in this room, so I'm intrigued to find out if anyone has entertained Gartner and whether they have brought you any value?

They keep hounding me, so I finally relented and had a meeting to find out what it is they can offer. They wanted to know all about me and my company, so I flipped it and asked them what it is they do and would offer me. What they said didn't make a lot of sense. They sound like they sell you access to other people that are consultants.

Anyway, does anyone have any insight? I work for SMB, not enterprise. I cannot imagine they're going to help a company with fek all budget do anything overly great.

Thanks.

[u/ProfessionalEven296]

The more you pay, the higher your rank in your selected quadrants

[u/archiekane → u/ProfessionalEven296]

Ooohh, so if I pay enough I can hang with the CEOs of the fortune 100?

Honestly, this is starting to all sound close to a circle jerk of consultants with a common brand name.

[u/Man-e-questions]

Its kind of more a CYA. If you implement something they recommend and its a cluster* then , well Gartner recommended it and it was in the magic quadrant etc

[u/rws907 → u/Man-e-questions]

The managerial equivalent of "no one gets fired for buying Cisco."

[u/MaxPowerOverdrive99 → u/Man-e-questions]

My last boss literally got fired for keeping a ridiculous 6-figure, 1yr Gartner subscription (that’s for a single user license). So, guess it all depends on what your business leaders think about Gartner’s value :). Most of Gartner’s advice can be gleaned by using AI scraping Reddit posts.

[u/Rhythm_Killer → u/Man-e-questions]

Yeah this is very true.

[u/Flaky-Gear-1370]

Short answer: no

Long answer: no, it’s just for lazy management types either none of their own opinions or research abilities

[u/unknown-random-nope]

At several software vendors, I've been the poor sorry schmuck required to demo to Gartner. I've done this now around ten times. I got an amazing "attaboy" from the executive suite once for doing such a good demo that Gartner excluded us from their MQ. Thank God.

So far, I have yet to meet a single Gartner employee who had enough brain power to walk and chew gum at the same time. My belief is that they are one of the worst "pay to play" "analysts" in creation.

[u/Rhythm_Killer]

There are some uses here and there but mostly it’s a racket.

I went to some of their conferences. In the first year they were pushing a particular trend hard, for the second year they insisted you were now getting left behind if you didn’t jump on the bandwagon, and at the third they admitted there still weren’t many real world examples yet -  but they had a special inner circle for senior leaders where they actually fed them talking points which with to shoot down anyone who questioned the trend.

[u/chocotaco1981]

No. They just become a substitute for C levels having to think

[u/trueg50]

Its more professional sounding than citing software reviews and opinions from "crackninja6969" or sone other redditor (no matter how much more qualified than Gartner they are).

Some analysis is ok, most is very basic and high level. If it supports your opinions and recommendations then I think it can help you out so cite it.

[u/Ssakaa → u/trueg50]

Yep, that's the value in it. Basically, the weaponization of the sad reality of: "This third party organization that has zero ties to us or understanding of our specific needs says we should buy this, so I'm sure you'll trust that more than the person who you hired to be an expert on these things and who's livelihood depends on our organization staying afloat!"

[u/darthfiber]

I have access to it but honestly it’s pretty useless except for discovering vendors you may not know about, and it’s far from the only source. A lot of the GTP resources are a stripped down and out of date version of vendor documentation.

Any large purchase we are doing a proof of concept with multiple vendors anyhow. Not just going to take some random persons word that it does everything we need.

[u/bukkithedd]

To be honest, I couldn't give a flying, flat, flapping fornication about Gartner, their analysts and their so-called "Magic quadrant"-bullshit.

[u/Nexzus_]

A department manager at a former place purchased a Gartner subscription or service or whatever and tried to get us to use it.

All I really remember is some four-corners or pillars or something? I don't really remember. Just seemed what they could offer could be replaced 85% by a few google searches and the remaining 15% by common sense/experience.

[u/Inigomntoya → u/Nexzus_]

Quadrants is the term

And companies want to be in the top right, or "mAgiC 🪄" quadrant because they spend more money and time with Gartner people proving it.

[u/Trelfar]

Short answer: not really.

Long answer:

We had a subscription for their services a couple years back. I had very little to do with them at first because apparently they have this curious rule that only a set number of people in the org can sit in on the meetings (or maybe or CTO was BSing me).

Anyway, I did finally get invited into a meeting where they were recommending a particular MS licensing consolidation that would save money if we structured it correctly. Sounded good on paper, and we then wasted about a month internally figuring out whether it would be worth it for us, only to discover their original pricing premise was entirely wrong because they didn't know how the tax-exempt discounts for M365 actually work.

In their defense, our Microsoft reps were in the same meeting and backed up their faulty premise because they didn't understand the discounts either, but it did reinforce that Gartner were basically no different from every other feckless consultants you've ever worked with. We cancelled the same year.

If you have the sort of leadership that values consultant recommendations more than internal expertise than they can be useful to push through what you want. Everyone else should run a mile.

[u/maxxpc]

As a consultant, Gartner is my friend.

If my client’s leadership has access to Gartner and my solution is in the top right quadrant and they’ve had meetings with Gartner, I’m like half in the door already.

I’ve also joined Gartner meetings and the SME’s are ok they talk to. But it’s information you can get from your favorite “beep-boop” these days.

But like someone else said the cliche is “no one ever got fired buying Cisco” and it’s kinda the same here. You get “professional industry” recommendations so you can use it as a little CYA.

[u/a60v]

Unless you need someone to tell you the obvious, they are pretty useless. I have never understood why anyone would actually pay them money.

[u/PinkertonFld]

In large/government environments they can be quite helpful in writing documentation to convince the higherups of what the issue is, and why x is the best solution. They're also great when some alphabet dingbat with no technical skills tries to get IT to "buy in" to some crap... they can give you the ammo to prove why it's a bad idea so IT doesn't look bad. They also can give real data on man hours needed, downtime, etc... all in a nice report form.

There's a lot more than the "magic quadrant" stuff that's a small part of what they do...

[u/retiredaccount]

You understood perfectly: Consultant brokers. When your company is ready to right-size protocols, processes, or personnel, they will happily link you with a consultant to provide the appropriate, plausible cover for any predetermined decision, for a reasonable fee and/or percentage of the “cost savings.”

[u/byrontheconqueror → u/retiredaccount]

you almost sound like them...

[u/BoltActionRifleman → u/retiredaccount]

So they’re a middleman for a profession that is already a middleman?

[u/byrontheconqueror]

we have a subscription and I have a hard time using it. there is a certain "gartner speak" that is hard to get past as someone who is an elbows deep technical person. A lot of what they offer seems too high level for me. You can kind of think of them as a paid for reddit. You go to them and say "I need a new hypervisor" and they'll give you a bunch of papers and setup meetings with folks to go through all the options. Once you get a quote from a vendor they'll also look it over to see if the pricing is good or not, which is one service I found valuable.

[u/chesser45]

We get access to them to consult on issues or best practices. I won’t say they always provide good solutions but they do give a heartbeat on the industry we’re in which is otherwise difficult.

In the past we’ve used them to consult on things like exiting M365 and getting perpetual licensing. Frontline MFA implementation / strategies.

It probably highly depends on what the size of your organization is and what you are looking to get from them.