IT advisory ideas & more...
Gartner Inc. (originally called Gartner Group) was born on April 1, 1979, together with a chap named David Stein. I had just predicted that the estimated $200 million ‘Information Industry’ (information about the realm of computers) would continue growing at an annual rate of 30%, and that we should attempt applying our knowledge, in order to share the expected growth. At the time I...
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IBM vs. Gartner During the 1980s, Part 4 As we moved forward, our responsibility was to continue analyzing the IT industry objectively for all our clients, and not about IBM in particular or for its benefit. Throughout the decade our company’s mission continued the education of all players in the IT marketplace, including those vendors who were meaningful, the large users and investors,...
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IBM vs. Gartner During the 1980s, Part 3 Here’s how the drama continued to unfold: In early March 1993 I was shocked to receive a call followed by a personal visit in my office by two people associated with IBM: Tom Barr and Nicholas Katzenback. Tom Barr was Cravath Swaine & Moore’s most famous lawyer and was handling the entire IBM account. Nicholas Katzenbach is a Rhodes...
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IBM vs. Gartner During the 1980s, Part 2 Several months passed after having spoken to IBM’s Don Otis I received another critical phone call, this time an indirect call from Ron Rolfe of Cravath Swaine and Moore, IBM’s counsel and the acknowledged heavy hitter of the entire U.S.’s legal profession! So once again the lawyers were getting into the act, always persistent, always...
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IBM vs. Gartner During the 1980s, Part 1 After leaving Oppenheimer to create, launch and manage Gartner Group in 1979, I continued to personally write and publish about the IBM Corporation — just as I had done previously for my financial buy-side clients (banks, insurance companies, et al.). Forbes quoted me in 1972: “there is nothing IBM does that fails to impact every aspect...
read moreStan Dale had just joined Gartner Group in sales, the summer of 1983. His territory was New England and shortly thereafter Bell Canada was added to his accounts. The following spring he and his associates decided to do some prospecting seminars in Canada – Bell Canada was then Gartner’s only Canadian account and they were receiving only one service, Telecom (STS). It was...
read morePeggy Pedwano was one of our most reliable and enthusiastic administrators, which is saying much given the strength of our admin, which was crucial in delivering client service. Her fondest memories of Gartner are the earliest days of everyone working together whether typing up greensheets (on IBM Selectric typewriters!), to stuffing binders, to prepare and enjoy “Gartner Gatherings”, and...
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Part 1: AFTER HUTTON & OPPENHEIMER, VCs INTERVENE In early 1970 E.F. Hutton hired me as a technology analyst, despite my having little financial background. One of my early successes was a detailed and timely report on Xerox Corp., then a ‘nifty fifty’ firm with steady growth and broad popularity among institutional investors. The report raised concerns that Xerox’s growth might...
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Around 1986 I was still working to formalize and document how Gartner’s culture had evolved since its 1979 founding; seven years old, it continued to maintain (and fine tune) its original research methods, but now embraced sales goals as well. By the following year 1987, we published our methods internally, distributed to our employees as “Theory G”. In hindsight, the name...
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Gartner’s Research Meetings When VCs Neill Brownstein and Chris Brody convinced me to leave Oppenheimer to found Gartner, they demanded a document that would guarantee their receipt of Gartner research, indefinitely! This led me to realize the importance of terse written research, and we structured our research meetings to enhance our research process, which would then...
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In Part 1 of this post I mentioned some of the sources for my research process ideology, resulting in a 1980s ‘research process’ for Gartner which included six major elements: Surveillance, Pattern Recognition, Stalking Horses (including the Magic Quadrant), Search, Document, and Strategic Planning Assumptions (primarily for conferences); while perhaps not followed explicitly,...
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Gartner’s Original Research process Part 1. I was influenced during Gartner Group’s first year (March 1979-April 1980) by reading two public documents: the book “the Tao Jones Averages: A Guide to Whole-Brained Investing” by Bennet Goodspeed, and an article written by David B. Montgomery and Charles B. Weinberg ‘Toward Strategic Intelligence Systems’...
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Part 1. After leaving Oppenheimer to create, launch and manage Gartner Group in 1979, I continued to personally write and publish about the IBM Corporation just as I had done previously for my financial buy-side clients (banks, insurance cos., et al). Forbes quoted me in 1972: “there is nothing IBM does that fails to impact every aspect of the industry…I prefer to know the...
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Soundview Part 2: The later years Banking relationships at most of the other Wall Street tech boutiques like Montgomery Securities were more important than research, which was often seen as creating a conflict. But Soundview’s concentration on research and research culture was as strong as it had been at Gartner Group even though it paid less than Wall Street’s elevated salaries and...
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Soundview: The early years Recall that I spent 9 years on Wall Street as a technology analyst just before Gartner Group (Gartner Inc.) was founded in March 1979. True, our Gartner charter was to sell from the very start into three different markets: IT vendors, users, and institutional investors. But we didn’t raise enough cash to build sales teams in all three markets, so to deal with...
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35th Anniversary of Gartner Inc.'s Founding: Gartner Inc. (originally called Gartner Group) was born on April 1, 1979, together with a ... [read more]
Oh My Darling Clementine: My three year-old grand-daughter Clementine is very smart. While she's never taken any piano lessons ... [read more]
Social Networking May Be Bad for Your Health: What might have once been called 'intellectual networking' seems to have been displaced by today's ... [read more]
Genius Economist Suggests Solution to Housing Problem: John Geanakoplos is James Tobin professor of economics at Yale University and one of the founders of Ellington Capital Management, ... [read more]
Which Executive Education School Is Tops?: Interestingly, executive education rankings by various publications produce results which seem all over the map. In fact, the ... [read more]