Why is Brightwork Better than Gartner or Forrester?

ByShaun Snapp

various Executive Summary

  • We were asked the question of why we are better than Gartner.
  • In this article, we explain all the reasons and provide supporting research.

Introduction

We discussed the question of how Brightwork is better than Gartner and Forrester with Robbert Naastepad.

Our References for This Article

If you want to see our references for this article and other related Brightwork articles, see this link.

Notice of Lack of Financial Bias: You are reading one of the only independent sources on Gartner. If you look at the information software vendors or consulting firms provide about Gartner, it is exclusively about using Gartner to help them sell software or consulting services. None of these sources care that Gartner is a faux research entity that makes up its findings and has massive financial conflicts. The IT industry is generally petrified of Gartner and only publishes complementary information about them. The article below is very different.

  • First, it is published by a research entity, not an unreliable software vendor or consulting firm that has no idea what research is. 
  • Second, no one paid for this article to be written, and it is not pretending to inform you while being rigged to sell you software or consulting services as a vendor or consulting firm that shares their ranking in some Gartner report. Unlike nearly every other article you will find from Google on this topic, it has had no input from any company's marketing or sales department. 

Comment from Robbert Naastepad

“Working for Teradata I need to ask you if you can you underpin your blunt statements with facts? Why are companies like SAP, Oracle, IBM and Teradata still in leaders quadrants reported by known analyst firms like Gartner and Forrester? Do you do the same kind and amount of research they do? Please show me facts. What counts for a company like SAP in this research by Brightwork, can not automatically be applied to other vendors in this sector.”

Our Response

“Robert,

We have plenty of evidence to show you to answer all of your questions.

Let us address the question of Gartner and Forrester. We have extensively analyzed the output for both Gartner and Forrester and wrote a book on Gartner. We describe the problem with how Gartner makes its money The Problem with How Gartner Makes its Money. Gartner and Forrester make the most fundamental violation of research rules by soliciting the same vendors that they rate, and by not declaring which vendors are paying them and how much. The clear reason for this is to deceive the readers as to their motivations. The lunacy of their output is demonstrated by their ODMS MQ which we analyzed here Can Anyone Make Sense of the ODMS Magic Quadrant?. This MQ places different database categories in the same MQ and then ranks them against each other! Which makes no sense and would identify anyone as a database ignoramus if it were not for Gartner’s brand. Notice that almost no open source databases are included only the commercial side of the open-source project.

Why? Obviously $$$.

Gartner functions to move clients to the most expensive solutions because those entities can pay them the most $$$. We covered this in How to Understand Gartner and the Patent Software Vendor System.

Gartner has zero interest in research is all about $$$. Gartner is a Rubix Cube of corruption. They have piles of VPs, “distinguishes analysts” and a highly aggressive quota system and sales culture. This is not conducive to research.

So much so that they operate a boiler room operations out of Fort Meyers to shake down vendors which we covered in The Gartner Sales Boiler Room in Fort Meyers.  Their upselling strategy is eerily similar to that employed by The Church of Scientology as we covered in The Similarities Between Gartner and Scientology in Sales Strategy. In fact, it looks like it was directly copied or vice versa. Gartner does not want TCO calculated because their biggest vendor customers have the highest TCO. And virtually all of the advice given by Gartner ends up looks inaccurate in retrospect. Just look at their disastrous advice on mainframes as we covered in How to Understand Gartner’s Disastrous Advice on Mainframes.  That is what happens when you work backwards from funding sources to conclusions.

Both Gartner and Forrester can be hired to produce the desired output by vendors. For example, Gartner completely bombed on its analysis of HANA as we covered in How Gartner Got HANA So Wrong.  Forrester has a similarly insane ranking for big data warehouse (whatever that is) as we covered in How to Best Understand Forrester’s Crazy Big Data Warehouse Rankings. Forrester has been repeatedly used by SAP to publish rigged information, as they did when they paid Forrester to find that HANA reduced TCO as we covered in How Accurate Was The Forrester TCO Study?, when Forrester announced SAP the leader in translytical databases as we covered in How to Understand What is a Transalytical Database. SAP then used this study to report the progress of HANA to Wall Street, without mentioning that SAP paid Forrester to put them as a leader in this new “category.” Forrester even produced a TCO/ROI study on S/4HANA which showed an average implementation cost of $870,000. Which is curious, as we have multiple data points showing $500 million implementations. Our TCO calculators for ECC (the precursor to S/4HANA) show no possible situation for a sub $1 million implementation as we covered in Enterprise Software TCO Calculator – SAP ERP/ECC/R/3. Forrester accepted only three projects from SAP to base the entire study on.

This is for a product that supposedly has 2000 live deployments. Odd, isn’t it? However, you can read our analysis here How to Understand Forrester’s Fake S/4HANA TCO Study.

Neither Gartner nor Forrester are research firms. They sell rigged output written by people who spend most of their time talking to executives and who lack first-hand exposure to the reality of projects. They are interpreted as research firms by people who do not know what research is or how the rules of research work. In the area of databases, they don’t seem to know enough about them to write on the topic, and their conclusions are easily traceable to their funding. No vendor can pay Brightwork to write a research piece.

You cannot perform research if you only care about money and if you are corrupt. This is why any research entity must either be publicly funded (as in academic research exclusive of medical research) or must substantially sub-optimize profits. Any profit optimized focus of research means undermining the research and altering it to meet the requirements of the entities that can pay the most.”

We would never produce a video like this. It is complete fluff that has little to do with the actual issues on IT projects.

Gartner frequently appears to run more of a fashion magazine than a technology analyst firm is more interested in promoting hot new trends than covering the fundamental aspects of technology. A significant part of what Gartner does is make buyers feel inadequate by overhyping trends, which are often merely illusions, as we cover in the article Gartner and the Devil Wears Prada.

Gartner coined the phrase “hype cycle.” However, what Gartner leaves out is they are probably the most crucial entity in legitimizing hype cycles. Every experimental item that comes along, be it AI or Big Data or ERP (in the 1980s and 1990s) Gartner, is there hyping the cycle. We cover this in the article How Gartner Promotes Hype Cycles. 

The Problem: Thinking that Gartner is Focused on What is True

Gartner is hired by companies who fundamentally don’t understand how Gartner functions. Gartner has virtually no first-hand experience in the technologies they evaluate and get most of their information from executives at buyers or executives at vendors and consulting firms. Gartner is also not a research entity. They compare very poorly to real research entities once you dig into the details, as we did in the article How Gartner’s Research Compares to Real Research Entities. Gartner serves to direct IT spending to the most expensive solutions as these are the companies that can afford to pay Gartner the most money. Gartner has enormously aggressive internal sales goals that place accuracy far below revenue growth in importance.