Whenever you look for the purchase decision influencers in business intelligence (BI) and business analytics, you end up looking at the trade press. And there’s some noteworthy news on that front this week: media giant TechTarget announced that they’ve acquired the BeyeNETWORK properties and network of experts. TechTarget plans to leverage BeyeNETWORK experts to build out their footprint in BI via the new SearchBusinessAnalytics.com destination site.
Regardless how this M&A looks once the dust settles, it will have a definite impact on the influence wielded by the BeyeNETWORK experts.
Many of these experts are solo or small-group professionals with deep subject matter expertise. The group includes analysts, consultants, lecturers and authors. They tend to have closely held relationships with their clients and industry contacts. They influence purchases, implementation, and best practices around enterprise business intelligence, data warehousing and analytics software. They engage with the market, and formulate and promote their own opinions. They can also play important roles in the influencer ecosystem as intermediaries — bringing the viewpoints of more powerful influencers, such as vendors, directly to their own contacts.
If you’re in the BI market, monitor BeyeNETWORK and TechTarget over the next 3 to 6 months to see which experts get more play, which get less, which get lost, and any new experts attracted by the larger combined media site. Keep your focus on the individual influencers, not the BeyeNETWORK brand itself.
For example, some of the BeyeNETWORK experts I recommend putting on your watch list: Merv Adrian, Lou Agosta, Leslie Ament, Steve Dine, Neil Raden, Craig Shiff, James Taylor, and Colin White.
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ZDNet blogger Paul Greenberg ran a poll last week asking who his readers trust most — analysts, journalists, institutional analysts, bloggers, others — “when it comes to a good, clean honest look at the enterprise technology industry… especially around traditional and social enterprise software (CRM, ERP, social network platforms) and technologies associated with it”.
With 171 votes to date, the most popular answers are “Ventana Research” (18%), “I don’t trust analysts” (16%), and Gartner (13%).
At least a few readers took issue with Paul mixing analysts such as Gartner with the likes of journalists, bloggers and institutional analysts. I agree with Paul in this instance. The traditional “analyst” role is part and parcel of the work performed by many journalists and bloggers. Plus, the overlay with institutional analyst reports is just as strong today as at any time in the past.
As I noted in the comments to Paul’s post, informed decision-makers bet on the jockey, not the horse. The results would be different if the poll presented a dozen enterprise analysts and journalists rather than company names like Gartner, Forrester and Frost & Sullivan.
As an aside: It looks as though Ventana put some effort into turning out their voters. It’s too bad they don’t work for the state of California. We could have used them for last week’s special election.
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