I’ve been working as a technology analyst here at Intellyx for more than 4 years now. Looking back, it’s been quite a journey and I’ve learned a lot watching markets evolve and fade away. But since starting, I haven’t taken time to look in the mirror.
Analysts fulfill a unique and often misunderstood role in the enterprise technology ecosystem.
- They’ll cover new products from vendors, but they aren’t reporters.
- They’ll talk to end customers and users about their projects, but they aren’t service delivery consultants.
- They’ll advise companies on product and marketing strategy, but they are neither developers nor marketers.
Wait, are we adding value through this kind of indirect influence as analysts, or just pontificating from an ivory tower?
Remembering when storytelling meant something else
I know I’m dating myself when I say I helped design and build corporate brand websites, web apps, and marketplaces since they were a thing. I even produced some interactive CD-ROM games before the internet was a thing. But I’ll spare you the grizzled hardship story of having to code an annoying installer in Notepad or test out video codecs.
Most of my professional life, I’ve been some form of marketing leader for highly technical vendors. In a software-driven field, it turned out that marketing roles fit me well since I was really good at visualizing user experiences, and telling great stories about how software should work, even if I was too attention-deprived for development.
In software marketing, we used to think of the technology press and industry analysts as one general category – and the AR/PR (analyst/press relations) functions of most vendors would be unified under one individual comms or marketing head, with more staff devoted to press than analysts.
Publications would even have labs – yes, LABS – where you could send in disks and a skilled reviewer would install it on lab computers, try out your new software development tools and rate it for the next magazine issue, if it was interesting enough.
Then, the whole bottom dropped out the press as we knew it. Paid subscriptions and advertising dollars got completely sucked up by search engine marketing and two generations of content aggregators like Buzzfeed, Mashable and Business Insider. Eventually, Facebook Google and LinkedIn even disintermediated the aggregators they made famous.
There are still good publications out there, but the decline of the technical industry press left the enterprise technology space leaning on analysts to get their stories out in an impartial, believable way.
View from the vendor side
I used to think I had all these great tricks for peddling my wares to influencers. The most obvious of which was getting them to discover my point on their own.
That’s still a pretty smart tactic, but success requires more of a relationship play than such a one-time trick. It’s not just a matter of asking analysts “what research are you working on right now?” Then saying you totally dig it, and are doing exactly that thing.
Analysts are curious, so as a vendor, it helps to be curious about their interests, rather than getting too caught up in your own business situation.
A skeptical comment from an analyst could be welcomed, instead of presenting defensiveness or judgment. Your management should relish such challenges, because they set you up better for objections coming from future, better, smarter clients.
Since my exposure to the analyst community and their research was often throttled by time and budget limitations, and my management never seemed to appreciate our current position on the radar, I sometimes viewed these relationships as adversarial.
In commiserating with other marketing peers at the overpriced analyst show, I’d hear similar questions emerge:
- “Why won’t they use the new term we coined for, or include us in, the XXX technology space?”
- “Why won’t they tell us how we’re better than XXX competitors?”
- “Why won’t they write something cool I can use in our slide deck?”
I was also self-aware enough to realize that while these frustrations were commonly held among us marketers, analysts are not machines, and they must work under their own set of constraints, of which the need for objectivity might be the most important and difficult to maintain.
View from the analyst corral
Now that I’m on the other side of the mirror, I’ve earned a new respect for this community as a whole.
We’re often running in the same analyst tracks at tradeshows, so there’s plenty of time for us to get to know each other. I can also recognize how solid the relationships between analysts and vendors can be, even when their opinions may differ.
Analysts can make very good CTOs or Chief Evangelists if they want to go back to the vendor side, because they have gained a new kind of understanding of market dynamics that causes a mix of products and clients to come together. (No, I’m not angling to go back to a vendor here!)
There’s not a good authority out there that could rate the analysts in any useful way, though an “Analyst of Analysts” happens to be a fun startup idea I entertained a couple decades ago.
I’m not sure how any client could trust the analyst ratings of any other analyst anyway, given the IT spend dollars at stake and the consolidation constantly happening among big whale analyst firms and a wild assortment of little independent nibbler fish.
There’s a predictions game we all must play, because we are constantly asked to provide statistics to support our thought leadership.
Mostly I try to stay away from statistics, but I do find myself grateful to the big firms and consultancies who can invest the resources and time to do primary research—even if the results between them vary.
It’s not something we’d have the scope to do ourselves, and that variability gives us something else to talk about.
The biggest change: ai, Ai, AI
Four years ago, I thought the SD-WAN market would still be going strong, while the open source commodification of firms supporting CI/CD and containerized microservices looked like it was going to trip the now-huge cloud native development market before it even got out of the gate.
Was I wrong on both accounts? Yes. But that’s not the biggest miss I would make.
AI (as in Artificial Intelligence, not ‘augmented or automated’ intelligence) has rapidly transformed itself and dozens of markets.
Even if we were aware that generative AIs like ChatGPT can ultimately generate bullshit, as my colleague Jason Bloomberg says, and we know they are getting overhyped across social networks and overvalued by vulture capitalists, nobody could have predicted the excitement the public and press would feel once they glimpsed the future.
We’re seeing AI work its way into everything—almost every platform or software product has put some form of generative AI magic into the mix. No vendor wants to be late to the party.
Even I’m starting to wonder, as our most miserly clients tell us: “Why don’t I just get ChatGPT to write your stuff for free instead?”
Sure, maybe you should use a chatbot—if you aren’t afraid of the reputational risk that might occur when your audience realizes they are looking at auto generated marketing content.
The Intellyx Take
In writing about technology vendors and their customers as an analyst, I’m constantly forming and debunking my own opinionated perspectives, without closing off the ability to continue to evolve our understanding of the spaces I’m covering.
I’d like to think I’m getting better every day at maintaining objectivity, while still helping our audience of end users and vendor clients ‘connect the dots’ between so many different technologies.
Living on this side of the mirror, at least I’m now more aware of how hard achieving that balance can be.
Copyright ©2023 Intellyx LLC. Intellyx is an industry analysis and advisory firm focused on enterprise digital transformation. Covering every angle of enterprise IT from mainframes to artificial intelligence, our broad focus across technologies allows business executives and IT professionals to connect the dots among disruptive trends. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer. No AI was used to write this article, however, craiyon.ai was used to render various forms of “robot psychoanalyst talking to blond Jesus on couch”
