In today’s cautious high technology industry, industry analysts’ recommendations affect half of IT and telecom purchases by businesses. Tomorrow I’ll be at Manchester Business School to speak at their corporate reputation research seminar to explain how most of the world’s largest tech brands use research to track their reputation within these third party influencers. At this seminar I’ll explain explain how these firms use those data to track and improve their reputation amongst industry analysts.
Clearly, the evaluation of analyst relations has developed massively over the last decade. Since the 2001 recession, the world’s largest buyers of IT solutions and services have started to systematically use analyst firms like Gartner, Forrester and Ovum to advise their technology investments. The growing adoption of technology standards means that many solutions have similar functionality. The difference is in innovation, responsiveness, customer-orientation and candour. As a result, reputation and relationships have become key variables in the analysts’ assessments of technology companies.
Please email Shalini.Vohra at postgrad.mbs.ac.uk if you wish to attend.
1 Comments
Couple of comments – though standards adoption is widespread in Telecoms, it is more marketing than reality in IT – whereby a single ‘standard’ can be ‘adopted’ in many different ways. At one level it is more and more difficult to chose between software solutions, but actually when you really look under the covers the differences remain huge – I think that is a real challenge for analyst firms (ours included) – to really take the time and frankly have the skills to examine the nuts & bolts of the solutions out there to be able to advise clearly.
Good luck in Manchester!
Best
Alan